London  - Scotland Yard will investigate claims by a former prisoner at Guantanamo Bay that British intelligence services were complicit in torture during his seven-year detention.

Binyam Mohamed, an Ethiopian national who was released from the notorious US camp last month, has alleged that information provided by Britain's MI5 intelligence service "directly led" to his torture.

Concluding several months of investigations Thursday, Britain's Attorney General, Baroness Scotland, said she had decided to ask the police to probe whether any criminal offences had been committed.

Mohamed, 30, who was arrested in Pakistan in 2002, has alleged that he was tortured in Pakistan, Afghanistan and at a "secret site" in Morocco, before he was sent to Guantanamo Bay in 2004.

Since returning to Britain, where he lived before his arrest in 2002, he has provided documents to prove that the questions he was asked during his interrogation could "only have come" from British intelligence.

Amnesty International Thursday welcomed the opening of a police investigation and said there needed to be a wider inquiry into allegations made by Mohamed "and others." (dpa)