September 23, 2008	Tuesday	Ramazan 22, 1429

KABUL, Sept 22; An Afghan journalist detained for 11 months at the main US military base at Bagram alleged on Monday that his captors kicked him, forced him to stand barefoot in the snow and didn’t allow him to sleep for days.

Jawed Ahmad, who was working for CTV, a Canadian television network, was handed over to Afghan authorities on Sunday, said Captain Christian Patterson, a spokesman for the US-led coalition.

The US designated him an “enemy combatant” earlier this year and had accused him of having contact with Taliban leaders, including possessing their phone numbers and video footage of them, according to a complaint filed by Ahmad’s lawyers earlier this year in US District Court in the District of Columbia.

Ahmad said that while in prison, US interrogators accused him of being a Taliban fighter, supplying weapons to the militants and of being an intelligence agent for Pakistan.

“What they blamed me for was not true. If it was true they would not have released me,” Ahmad told The AP at a hotel in Kabul on Monday. Patterson said Ahmad was released because he was no longer considered a threat.

The 21-year-old was detained on Oct 26, 2007, at a Nato base near the southern city of Kandahar.

Ahmad said an American military public affairs officer called him to come to the base, and he was taken into custody in the US Special Forces compound.

During his Kandahar detention, Ahmad alleges he was kicked, that his head was slammed into a table and that he wasn’t allowed to sleep for nine days.

US officials threatened to send him to Guantanamo for years, he said. His head was shaved, he was made to wear an orange jumpsuit and flown to the main US base at Bagram. He said soldiers there forced him to stand for six hours on the snowy runway with no shoes. He said he passed out twice and was forced to stand back up.

Capt. Kaymberley Juradl, a spokeswoman for the US-led coalition, said Ahmad had access to routine medical treatment while at Bagram, met with the International Committee of the Red Cross, and that Ahmad didn’t make any reports to officials that he was abused.

“We take those kind of allegations seriously and our people are trained to respect everybody, and we don’t abuse people like that,” she said. Ahmad said he wasn’t abused at the Bagram detention facility, but that fellow prisoners beat him and once broke some of his ribs on the left side of this body.—AP