A senior lawyer in the office of Baroness Scotland, the attorney general, has been studying the cases of five British men alleged to have been unlawfully detained and tortured in Pakistan with the complicity of MI5.
Baroness Scotland is expected to decide this week whether there is sufficient evidence to refer the cases to Scotland Yard for a full investigation.
Ali Dayan Hasan, a researcher for Human Rights Watch, said he has been given evidence from Pakistani officials that MI5 and MI6 officers knew about the torture but continued to take part — directly or indirectly — in interrogations.
Allegations of complicity in the torture of Britons have become MI5's biggest crisis of recent years.
There has been a backlash in Whitehall amid the belief that human rights lawyers and Islamic activists are, perhaps unwittingly, helping the cause of Islamic extremism.
Writing in The Daily Telegraph earlier this month, Jonathan Evans, the director-general of MI5, issued a passionate defence of the Security Service against the "conspiracy theory" that it covered up its involvement in torture.
It came after Lord Neuberger said that there was a "culture of suppression" at MI5.
Baroness Scotland called in detectives over two cases last year, including that of Binyam Mohamed, the former Guantánamo Bay detainee who was tortured by the CIA.
An MI5 officer who questioned Mr Mohamed in Pakistan is the subject of the Metropolitan police inquiry into whether he broke international laws on torture.
Detectives are also examining the role of MI5 in the case of Shaker Aamer, an inmate of Guantanamo Bay whose family lives in London, and an MI6 officer is under investigation over a British resident illegally detained in Pakistan in 2002.
The five new cases being considered include that of a 24-year-old medical student, identified only as ZZ, who was allegedly abducted off the street and tortured for two months in a building opposite the British deputy high commission in Karachi. Towards the end of his detention, he says, he was questioned by two British intelligence officers.
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