Pakistan has abducted hundreds of people as part of the US-led "war on terror", Amnesty International claimed today.
Some suspects were held in Pakistani interrogation centres, but many were handed over to US custody and held in Guantanamo Bay, Bagram Airbase or other secret detention facilities, the group said in a report on "enforced disappearances in the war on terror".
Detainees sit inside the medium security portion of Camp Delta detention center at the Guantanamo Bay US Naval Base
In many cases, US agents paid a bounty of $5,000 to those, usually intelligence agents, who simply declared people terrorists, seized them and handed them over for interrogation with no legal process, Amnesty said.
"Enforced disappearances were almost unheard of in Pakistan before the start of the US-led war on terror - now they are a growing phenomenon, spreading beyond terror suspects," Amnesty researcher Angelika Pathak said.
"The Pakistani government must set up a central register of detainees and publish regular lists of all recognised places of detention so that in future nobody can be secretly imprisoned and face the risks of torture," she added.
The rights group said the secret nature of the "war on terror" made it impossible to know exactly how many people had been forcibly "disappeared" and tortured or illegally executed, but the number must run into hundreds.
It cited a Pakistani military spokesman as saying in June this year that 500 terrorists had been killed and more than 1,000 arrested since 2001.
Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf is in Britain as part of a tour to promote his memoirs.
His tour became controversial when he said in a US television interview that a senior US official had threatened to bomb his country back to the stone age unless he co-operated fully in the war on terror launched after the September 11th, 2001 attacks.