LONDON, Feb 5: Home Secretary Jacqui Smith has been asked to respond to questions raised during a hearing this week by the joint committee on human rights on allegations of British complicity in torture in Pakistan.

Brad Adams, Asia Director at Human Rights Watch who briefed the committee, feels that Britain is following a policy of condoning torture in the interests of national security.

Ian Cobin, senior reporter of the Guardian, and Ali Dayan Hasan, senior researcher of HRW’s Asia Programme, also briefed the committee.

Writing in the Guardian on Thursday (Licence to Torture), Mr Adams referred to the case of Salahuddin Amin, a British citizen convicted in 2007 for plotting attacks against targets, including the ‘Ministry of Sound’ nightclub, and quoted him as saying that while in Pakistani custody he was met by British intelligence officials on almost a dozen occasions between sessions of torture.

“Zeeshan Siddiqui, another British citizen, was detained in Pakistan in 2005 and tortured by the ISI – Pakistan’s main intelligence service – while being interrogated over his alleged membership of Al Qaeda. He reports being beaten, chained, injected with drugs and threatened with sexual abuse. British intelligence officials, who he says visited him, must have known from visible injuries that he had been mistreated.

“Rangzieb Ahmed, from Rochdale, says he was beaten with sticks, whipped with electric cables and deprived of sleep; over a three-day period, he says, his fingernails were pulled out as ISI officials interrogated him. He was convicted of being an Al Qaeda member and of directing terrorism. Crucially, at his trial the government did not deny defence claims that MI5 sent the ISI questions to put to Ahmed during interrogation and that MI5 questioned him while he was in ISI custody,” recounted Mr Adams.

For Mr Adams what is most disturbing about these accounts is that the British government knew fully well the techniques the ISI and Pakistani law-enforcement agencies use in interrogations, particularly in terror cases.