NEW YORK, April 17: A US civil rights group has sued the Bush administration in a Federal Court asking it to declare its prolonged detention of hundreds of Muslim men after Sept 11 “biased” and “unconstitutional”.

According to a report in the New York Times a class-action lawsuit prepared by the group, the Centre for Constitutional Rights, accused the government of arbitrarily holding Muslim detainees in prison for months on minor immigration violations, with no hearings to determine whether the government had probable cause to hold them.

They have also been subjected to excessively harsh treatment in jails in New Jersey and Brooklyn, the complaint said, and in some cases could not practise their religion, contact their families or seek the help of their consular officials.

The lawsuit will be filed today in United States District Court in Brooklyn, said Barbara J. Olshansky, a lawyer for the centre, the Times said.

“We want the world to know that we are treating students, tourists, people here for short period of time, as criminals,” Ms Olshansky said.

“We’re putting them into arbitrary detention, just like the worst totalitarian regimes we cry out all the time about in this country.”

About 1,200 Muslim men, including many Pakistanis, were arrested in the first weeks after the terror attacks, most eventually charged with minor immigration violations such as overstaying a visa.

The paper said as of mid-February, according to the only information provided by the Justice Department, 327 of the original detainees were still in custody on immigration charges.

The suit names as defendants Attorney General John Ashcroft; Robert S. Mueller III, the director of the FBI; James W. Ziglar, the commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service; Dennis Hasty, the warden of the Metropolitan Detention Centre in Brooklyn; and unnamed corrections officers at the detention centre who are accused of beating and abusing some detainees.

A Justice Department spokesman said the agency would not comment on the complaint. Efforts by civil rights groups and immigration lawyers to find out more about the detainees have been blocked by Mr Aschcroft’s decision to hold hearings on the detainees behind closed doors.