Pakistanis freed from Guantanamo Bay claimed they saw US interrogators throw, tear and stand on copies of Islam's holy book, and one former detainee said naked women sat on prisoners' chests during questioning.
The Pentagon denied the accusations and said al-Qaeda training manuals instruct prisoners to make such false charges.
The men acknowledged that they were aware of the international furor caused by previous reports about Koran desecrations. Such reports triggered protests across the Islamic world and deadly riots in Afghanistan last month.
Seventeen Pakistanis were released on Monday from a jail in Lahore, where they had been held since their release nine months ago from the US prison for terror in Cuba. A Pakistani official said each had been "declared innocent by America" and cleared of involvement in terrorism by Pakistani intelligence.
The claims of the men, who spoke to reporters after joyful family reunions outside the jail in Lahore, could not be confirmed independently. Reporters briefly interviewed six of the men separately, sometimes interrupted by Pakistani officials who appeared anxious to keep the men from making the allegations.
All six said they were arrested in Afghanistan after going there to fight the US-led coalition that ousted the hard-line Taliban regime in late 2001 for harboring Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda network.
"During interrogation, whenever I would make a reference to the Koran they would hit me in the face with a copy [of it]. They would tear it into pieces. They would tell me that Koran teaches us terrorism," said Salahuddin Ayubi, a 31-year-old from Rajanpur.
"They would throw the Koran against the roof, which would tear it into pieces and they would say 'This is the real source of terrorism,"' Ayubi said. "This happened several times in my interrogation."
Hafiz Ahsan, a 26-year-old Lahore tailor who said he was arrested three years ago in southern Afghanistan during the jihad against the US -- claimed he saw interrogators stand on the Koran and throw the book in urine.
"Our interrogators would stand on the Koran and they would ask, `Call your God and ask him to rescue you,"' he said. "They would throw Koran in a bucket of urine. They would tear the Koran and throw it at our faces. All this happened in front of our eyes. It was a routine."
He claimed inmates staged a hunger strike in protest, and were then tortured with electric shocks.
Lieutenant Commander Flex Plexico, a Pentagon spokesman, said inmates at Guantanamo are treated humanely and there are "adequate standard operating procedures in place to ensure detainee religious faith is respected."
Plexico said al-Qaeda taught detainees to make false abuse allegations.
"That these detainees are now making allegations of abuse at Guantanamo seems to fit the standard operating procedure in al-Qaeda training manuals," he said.
A Pentagon report released this month confirmed five cases in which US guards at Guantanamo mishandled the Koran, including incidents in which one copy of the book was splashed with urine and another was stepped on.
The report concluded that none of the guards flushed the Koran down the toilet -- an explosive allegation that surfaced in a Newsweek magazine report. The magazine later retracted the report.
The former detainees said that they had learned about the controversy from other inmates and prison officials.
RSS