NEW YORK, Feb 28: The US government has agreed to pay $300,000 to settle a lawsuit brought by an Egyptian who was among dozens of the Muslims arrested in New York after 9/11 attacks, detained for months in a federal detention centre in Brooklyn and deported, said a New York Times report on Tuesday.

The settlement, filed in the federal court on Monday, is the first the government has made in a number of lawsuits charging that non-citizens were abused and their constitutional rights violated after the terror attacks.

Ehab Elmaghraby, the Egyptian, had filed the lawsuit after being released from the prison.

“Despite the fact that the United States admitted no wrongdoing, they are compensating Mr Elmaghraby for the injuries he suffered,” his lawyer told reporters.

“This is a substantial settlement and shows for the first time that the government can be held accountable for the abuses that have occurred in Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo Bay and in prisons right here in the United States,” one of the lawyers, Alexander A. Reinert, told the Times.

The lawsuit accuses former attorney-general John Ashcroft and FBI director Robert S. Mueller of personally conspiring to violate the rights of Muslim immigrant detainees on the basis of their race, religion and national origin. It names a score of other defendants, including Bureau of Prison officials and guards at the Metropolitan Detention Centre in Brooklyn.

The newspaper said Mr Elmaghraby, who spent nearly a year in detention, and a Pakistani, Javaid Iqbal, held for nine months, charged that while shackled they were kicked and punched until they bled.

Their lawsuit said they were cursed as terrorists and subjected to multiple ‘unnecessary body-cavity searches’.

In a telephone interview from his home in Alexandria, Mr Elmaghraby, 38, told the Times that he had reluctantly decided to settle because he was ill, in debt and about to have surgery for a thyroid ailment aggravated by torture in the detention centre.