Jail's controversial role as 'Britain's Guantanamo Bay'

Belmarsh prison cages some of Britain's worst criminals including rapists, murderers and terrorist killers.

But people convicted of more trivial crimes such as motoring offences have also found themselves locked in its small cells.

Its use as a detention centre for foreign terror suspects is controversial.

Amnesty International's UK director, Kate Allen, has said: "The Home Secretary has created something close to a Guantanamo Bay in our own backyard."

A report on the conditions faced by the detainees last October by the chief inspector of prisons Anne Owers criticised "lack of regular association, access to telephones, and in the case of prisoners whose first language was not English, access to interpreters and information in a language they understood".

But despite its high security category, the report said searches at the prison, which was opened in 1991, were so lax that inmates have successfully concealed mobile phones in their underpants.

One of its famous inmates was disgraced peer Jeffrey Archer whose prison diaries reveal he thought conditions grim and that "everyone we pass seems to be in an advanced state of depression".