17 January 2005	Monday	06 Zilhaj 1425

KABUL, Jan 16: US forces in Afghanistan have freed 81 Taliban prisoners from a jail at the Bagram air base, north of the capital Kabul, the Afghan chief justice said on Sunday.

An Afghan Supreme Court official said earlier the men had been released from the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, but the chief justice said the suspects had never left Afghanistan.

"They have been released from Bagram," Chief Justice Fazl Hadi Shinwari told reporters. "We will give them clothes and then send them home." He said US authorities had said they would free their remaining Afghan prisoners.

"There are another 400 Taliban in Bagram and they (the US military) have promised to release all Taliban from Bagram and Guantanamo Bay," he said. US forces captured hundreds prisoners when it toppled Afghanistan's radical Islamist Taliban government in late 2001 for failing to surrender Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

Prisoners deemed to be the greatest security risk were taken bound and shackled to Guantanamo Bay, while others were kept at US bases across Afghanistan. Accusations of mistreatment of prisoners have dogged US military jails from Iraq, to Afghanistan and its base in Cuba.

"I have very bad memories of the interrogation because they were torturing us," said one of the prisoners released on Sunday, Abdul Manan, 35, from Kunar, in eastern Afghanistan.

"But after the interrogation period was over, everything was alright," he told reporters outside the Supreme Court in Kabul. "God has given us freedom and we are very happy to be going back to our homes," said another Abdul Aziz.

A Taliban spokesman said all Afghan prisoners should be freed. "All the prisoners under the custody of the Americans either inside or outside Afghanistan, they are innocent people, they are not Taliban," Taliban spokesman Abdul Latif Hakimi told Reuters by satellite telephone.

"The Americans are torturing and harming those innocent people in their jails." Some 18,000 US troops are still based in Afghanistan engaged in the hunt for Al Qaeda and the remnants of the Taliban. -Reuters