An Egyptian arrested after the September 11 attacks, detained for 10 months and then deported, has been awarded £170,000 by the US government. Ehab Elmaghraby, who ran a restaurant in Manhattan, was among dozens of Muslims detained after the outrages in New York and Washington. He sued the government with another former detainee, a Pakistani immigrant, who is still pursuing the action.

Mr Elmaghraby, 38, was held in maximum security conditions in Brooklyn from October 2001 until August 2002. In the lawsuit, filed in 2004, the men said they were shackled, shoved into walls and punched, kept in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day and denied adequate meals and medical care. Haeyoung Yoon, Mr Elmaghraby’s lawyer, said her client had wanted to continue with the lawsuit but settled because he was ill and faced mounting medical costs.

Daily Telegraph, 1 March 2006

A UN inquiry into conditions at Guantánamo Bay has called on Washington to shut down the prison, and says treatment of detainees in some cases amounts to torture, UN officials said yesterday.

The report also disputes the Bush administration’s legal arguments for the prison, which was sited at the navy base in Cuba with the purpose of remaining outside the purview of the US courts, and says there has been insufficient legal process to decide whether detainees continued to pose a threat to the US.

The report lists techniques in use at Guantánamo that are banned under the UN’s convention against torture, including prolonged periods of isolation, exposure to extremes of heat and cold, and humiliation, including forced shaving. The UN report also focuses on a relatively new area of concern in Guantánamo – the resort to violent force-feeding to end a hunger strike by inmates.

Guardian, 14 February 2006