LONDON, Oct 1: One of four Britons still held by the United States at the Guantanamo Bay naval base in Cuba claims in a letter released by lawyers on Friday that he has been subjected to "vindictive torture" and death threats.

Moazzam Begg, from Birmingham in the English Midlands, also claimed in a hand-written letter - which somehow passed censorship - that he had witnessed the deaths of two fellow detainees "at the hands of US military personnel".

Mr Begg, 36, who has been detained for more than two years, insisted he was a law-abiding British citizen, that he had never met Osama Bin Laden, and was not a member of Al Qaeda or any other paramilitary organisation.

His four-page letter, made public in London by his lawyers, marked the first time that any communication from a serving Guantanamo detainee has been made public, the attorneys said.

"During several interviews, particularly - though unexclusively - in Afghanistan, I was subjected to pernicious threats of torture, actual vindictive torture and death threats - amongst other coercively employed interrogation techniques," Begg wrote.

He added: "In this atmosphere of severe antipathy towards detainees was the compounded use of racially and religiously prejudiced taunts." "This culminated, in my opinion, with the deaths of two fellow detainees at the hands of US military personnel, to which I myself was partially witness," he alleged.

Mr Begg, who was arrested in Pakistan in Feb 2002, was among nine Britons known to have been detained at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, of whom four were released last March, then released upon their arrival home without charge.

Three of them have since alleged in a dossier published in July that they had been abused while in US captivity. The remaining four - Begg; and Feroz Abbasi, 23, Martin Mubanga, 29, and Richard Belmar, 23, all of London - face trial by military tribunals for alleged involvement in global terrorism.

Begg's letter, dated July 12 this year, was addressed "to whom it may concern" at the US Forces Administration at Guantanamo Bay. It was signed with his name and his prisoner number, 00558.

He requested at the end of the letter that copies be sent to the Home Secretary, the US Supreme Court, the European Court of Human Rights, Amnesty International, and the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Begg's US counsel Clive Stafford Smith said he would file a legal demand next Monday to end his client's "inhumane treatment" immediately, and for the US government to publish detailed evidence of Begg's alleged torture.

Civil liberties lawyer Gareth Pierce meanwhile called upon the British government to take Begg's letter to the United Nations as evidence of torture, with the demand that the United States be held responsible. "But most importantly in the case of Mr Begg that he is repatriated immediately," she said. "What do we do when Mr Begg's captors are in fact a state, a rogue state, acting wholly illegally?" -AFP