Libyan Muslim denounces prisoner abuse in UK

In a live interview with Press TV on Monday, 28-year-old Faraj Hassan said that shortly after arriving in the UK in 2002, the British police arrested him and locked him up for the next 15 months without trial before eventually filing terrorism charges against him in 2003 under the UK Terrorism Act.

"After spending months in detention, I was told that they wanted to extradite me to Italy. I fought this case for approximately five years," Hassan said.

The British government refused to release him and kept him in a number of prisons where he underwent "occasional beatings" for "refusing to share cells with individuals who got pornographic photographs or sometimes for refusing a strip search."

Hassan compared his situation in prison to the situation of inmates held in the US military detention facilities of Abu Ghraib in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, saying that "is exactly what happens everyday in British jails... and they deliberately do it to Muslims because Muslims do not like to be naked in front of other men."

He also referred to the many Muslims suffering in isolation in UK prisons, where inmates are kept "in a prison within the bigger prison."

Faraj Hassan won his court case after the UK High Court judge was convinced that the UK Home Office and security services failed to present evidence of his links to terrorism.