Britain holding 90 Afghans at military jail in Camp Bastion

Defence Secretary Philip Hammond today admitted between 80 and 90 detainees are being held at a controversial military prison in Afghanistan.

Usually prisoners are released to Afghan authorities after 96 hours, but lawyers acting for some detainees claim they have been held for up to 14 months without charge.

Mr Hammond denied Camp Bastion’s detention centre in Helmand was “secret” or that it compared in any way to the US prison at Guantanamo Bay.

He told the BBC: “We are holding a number of people at the temporary holding facility at Camp Bastion, far more than we would like to be holding.

“We would like nothing more than to be able to hand these people over to the Afghan authorities properly so that they can go through the Afghan judicial system,”

Mr Hammond said lawyers working on behalf of the detainees, suspected of killing British troops, had sought to block their transfer fearing ill-treatment by Afghan security services.

Since the military ceased handing detainees to Afghan authorities numbers at the base had soared from around 20 at any one time to the current level.

He added: “What we’ve been doing since then is working with the Afghans and with other allies in Afghanistan to develop a safe pathway for the transfer of these detainees into the Afghan judicial system.”

Lawyer for eight detainees Phil Shiner said: “The UK could have trained the Afghan authorities to detain people lawfully and with proper standards, making sure that they are treated humanely.”

He added: “They’ve chosen not to do so. They’ve chosen to go down a route which I think is deeply worrying and entirely unconstitutional.”