CAIRO: A British national is alleging that he was tortured in Egypt in collusion with UK intelligence agencies, British daily the Guardian reported Sunday. Twenty-six-year-old Azhar Khan says that he was detained at Cairo Airport when he and a friend flew to Egypt on July 9, 2008 for a holiday. While Khan s friend was not detained, Khan was held for 24 hours before being hooded, handcuffed and bundled into the back of a vehicle, the newspaper says. Khan alleges that he was taken to a building a short distance away with barred windows where he was stripped naked, handcuffed and the hood placed on his head again. Sounds of other people being tortured were audible, Khan claims, including the voice of one man who spoke English with a British accent. The Guardian says that it has been informed by a reliable source that MI5 "had an interest in another person who was in detention in Egypt at the same time as Khan . Khan was arrested in connection with a plot to blow up a nightclub and shopping center in the UK in March 2004 but released without charge. The Guardian reports that Khan was interrogated twice a day, in English, about the bomb plot, and about his friends and associates in the UK. He alleges that the information used during the interrogations could only have come from the UK. Khan continues to receive medical and professional care for the physical and mental trauma caused by the torture and mistreatment he was subject to which included electric shocks, beatings and being forced to stand on the same spot with little rest during his five-day detention. The British Foreign Ministry reportedly admitted it knew that Khan has been tortured. The British government is currently embroiled in controversy surrounding the rendition and torture of terrorism suspects, after British resident and former Guantanamo detainee Binyam Mohamed alleged that British security agencies were complicit in his torture. Rights groups have long alleged that terrorism suspects are surreptitiously sent to Egypt and other countries in the region by the United States for interrogation. In Human Rights Watch s 2005 report "Black Hole , which examines the rendition of Islamists to Egypt, CIA official Robert Baer is quoted as saying, "If you want a serious interrogation, you send a prisoner to Jordan. If you want them to be tortured, you send them to Syria. If you want someone to disappear - never to see them again - you send them to Egypt.
