CAIRO, February 27, 2005 (IslamOnline.net) – A Briton held for years in the US-run jails in Afghanistan and Guantanamo said his US jailers sexually taunted him and broke his skull with a rifle butt, a leading British newspaper revealed Sunday, February 27.

Richard Belmar, a 25-year-old Briton returning from three years' detention in Afghanistan and Guantanamo, told The Observer he was hung up on the bars of his cage, a torture technique known as strappado, and deprived from showers for at least two months.

He also told the paper he witnessed the death of another detainee by the American jailers.

Belmar said he was consigned to the US by the British MI5 intelligence service which shrugged off an American recommendation to recruit him as an agent in the so-called war on terror.

Moazzam Begg, another Briton recently freed from the notorious Guantanamo detention camp, has accused his US captors of coercing him into making a false confession of being member of Al-Qaeda.

Human Rights Watch said last year that the US forces in Afghanistan were setting a terrible example in arbitrarily detaining civilians, using excessive force during arrests and mistreating detainees.

Amnesty International also published a report last April, hitting out at Washington’s violations of prisoners’ rights in Guantanamo and Afghanistan.

In June, Human Rights Watch issued a report entitled “The Road To Abu Ghraib” linking the abuse of detainees in Iraq , Afghanistan and Guantanamo to the policies adopted by US President George W. Bush in his so-called war on terror.