Human rights activists and victims of alleged torture today called for the government to investigate claims that detainees here have been subjected to abuse similar to that meted out to Iraqi prisoners by US troops.

Led by a pressure group seeking the abolition of detention without trial under the feared Internal Security Act (ISA), about 20 protesters handed an 11-page memorandum listing details of alleged abuse to the special commission on police reform.

It was the latest in a series of moves by several rights groups to highlight claims by 31 alleged Islamic militants that they had been beaten, stripped naked and sexually humiliated while in detention.

Commission chairperson Mohamed Dzaiddin Abdullah said he would study the memorandum in detail and expressed anger when told that special branch police officers were present at the commission's building taking pictures of the activists.

The chairman of the "Abolish ISA Movement", Syed Ibrahim Syed Noh, told reporters before handing over the memo that he believed the alleged abuse was "as bad" as that in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

Photographs published around the world showed inmates at the prison outside Baghdad who had been stripped naked and forced into humiliating, sexually suggestive poses.

Syed said he was "disappointed" that Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi had dismissed the complaints of the detainees as untrue without holding an investigation.

Unreported cases aplenty

The movement had forwarded the statement by the detainees to the police and the government-backed National Human Rights commission (Suhakam) on Jan 19 but had not received any reply, the group said in a statement.

It called for the ISA to be abolished, saying "this is the only way to convince the world that Malaysia does not condone torture of detainees as happened in Iraq by the US military."

The memo presented to the police commission detailed allegations of abuse of detainees stretching back to the 1970s.

It said the cases were believed to be only the "tip of the iceberg" as many others could have gone unreported for fear of reprisals.

The Malaysian government roundly condemned the abuse of the Iraqi prisoners, and has now been accused of hypocrisy and failing to act on the reported torture of its own detainees.

Malaysia has detained more than 80 alleged Islamic militants under the ISA, a number of them allegedly members of the Jemaah Islamiah (JI) group blamed for a series of deadly attacks in the region, including the Bali blasts that claimed 202 lives in October 2002. - AFP