NEW YORK, Feb 11: Military officials at the US-run prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, strapped hunger-striking prisoners to restraint chairs for hours to feed them through tubes, according to a report in Thursday’s New York Times.

Responding to the report, the Amnesty International has called for international medical experts to be allowed to visit the prison.

The Times, citing unnamed military officials, said the tougher measures came in after the authorities concluded some of the prisoners were determined to kill themselves. There has been a drop in the number of hunger strikers since, an official claimed.

Only four detainees are on hunger strike at present — down from 84 at the end of December, the chief spokesman for the Guantanamo detainee operation, Lt Col Jeremy Martin, said.

Lawyers called the treatment abusive. “t is clear that the government has ended the hunger strike through the use of force,” Thomas B Wilner, a lawyer at Shearman & Sterling in Washington, told the newspaper.

In a statement Curt Goering, Senior Deputy Executive Director of Amnesty International USA, said: “IUSA is deeply concerned at new reports of cruel treatment of detainees on hunger strike at Guantanamo Bay and calls for independent doctors to be given immediate access to Guantanamo Bay to determine what is happening, to whom and with what degree of consent.

“The World Medical Association’s position, supported by the American Medical Association, states that ‘the ultimate decision on intervention or non-intervention should be left with the individual doctor without the intervention of third parties whose primary interest is not the prisoners’ welfare’.