THE UK Border Agency (UKBA) has failed properly to investigate claims of mistreatment by failed asylum seekers, including a woman handcuffed while undergoing a biopsy on a breast lump, according to an official inquiry report published on Friday.

The woman, a 32-year-old Cameroonian torture victim, was handcuffed while being taken into the operating theatre for surgery, and again after coming round from the anaesthetic. On each occasion hospital staff asked for the handcuffs to be removed; on each occasion their requests were refused.

The complaint, dating back to 2004, is among several highlighted in the investigation into allegations of physical and racial abuse of asylum seekers facing deportation by private security guards published by Baroness O'Loan. She cites the case as an example of the failure properly to investigate complaints of ill-treatment and concludes that private security firms have inadequately managed the use of force by their staff.

But she says that her investigation did not find evidence of systematic abuse that critics claim has taken place in privately run detention facilities.

The report comes as several women at Yarl's Wood detention centre, Bedfordshire in central England, enter the sixth week of a hunger strike over what they claim is mistreatment by guards.

The O'Loan inquiry was ordered after the July 2008 report, Outsourcing Abuse, by the law firm Birnberg Peirce, Medical Justice and the National Coalition of Anti-Deportation Campaigns, was sent to the home secretary by Lord Ramsbotham, a former chief inspector of prisons. The original report was based on 300 cases of alleged physical assault and racial abuse over a period of six years. The names and details of 48 individual cases were passed to the Home Office.

Baroness O'Loan looked in detail at 29 of the 48 cases in which complaints had been made and found an inadequate or no investigation at all by UKBA in 18 cases. In some cases staff were shown not to have even considered whether the use of force had been “proportionate or necessary” before applying handcuffs or other restraint techniques.

The Cameroonian woman, named as Ms SK, was kept handcuffed for 30 hours on one of three visits to Hairmyres hospital, Glasgow, from Dungavel removal centre, southeast of the city, and was only allowed to visit the toilet with a chain extension to her handcuffs. In five cases there was so little information it was not possible to make a judgment.

The report was seized on Friday night by Lin Homer, the UKBA chief executive, who in a foreword to the O'Loan report accused the authors of the original report of “seeking to damage the reputation of our contractors” and demanding they now accept there had been no systemic abuse.

— The Guardian, London