International Security Assistance Forces honor guards take part in a flag-lowering ceremony in Kabul, Afghanistan on December 8, 2014. (Associated Press photo)
The United States has pulled out of all prisons in Afghanistan and no longer holds any detainees, a US official confirmed, as Washington extricates itself from the war-torn country.
The announcement on Wednesday came after the release of a searing Senate report on the brutal US treatment of "war on terror" detainees triggered worldwide condemnation, including from Afghanistan's new President Ashraf Ghani.
Asking not to be named, the US official confirmed to AFP that after a careful review by the Pentagon and the State Department, the last "third-country nationals" in US custody in Afghanistan had been transferred, and the US military no longer operates any detention facilities there.
Nazifullah Salarzai, a spokesman for Ghani, said a "limited number" of foreign detainees were handed over to the Afghan authorities.
"But I do not have any figures to give you and cannot talk about their nationalities. They will be treated according to the law," Salarzai said.
In March 2013, Afghan forces took full control from the US of the notorious Bagram prison, renamed Parwan, located on the sprawling Bagram US military airbase. But the US had remained in charge of foreign prisoners.
The damning 500-page Senate report referred to numerous "black sites" around the world where measures such as "rectal feeding" were meted out, including a site known as the "Salt Pit" located outside the airbase.
Harsh treatmentUS management of the Bagram jail, around 40 kilometres outside Kabul, had been especially controversial.
Rights groups have accused US authorities of carrying out prisoner abuse at the facility, and a US army report found that two inmates were beaten to death in 2002.
Nine Pakistani prisoners were sent home from Bagram in August. And US troops in Afghanistan said on Sunday they had handed over another three Pakistani detainees to Islamabad.
A Pakistani security official said one of them was Latif Mehsud, a close aide to the former chief of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), Hakimullah Mehsud.
Several former Bagram detainees interviewed by AFP over the last year have described the ill-treatment they suffered at the facility.
The abuse included beatings, sleep deprivation, intimidation with military dogs and mistreating copies of the Koran in order to insult and wear down the devout Muslim prisoners.
"They wanted us to never have a moment's peace, day or night. By the time we left, they wanted our minds to be destroyed," Pakistani truck driver Umran Khan told AFP, speaking in April of his nine-year incarceration in Bagram.
Like many other Bagram detainees, Khan was never charged with any offence and indeed his official file said there was no evidence to link him to militancy.
Russian chargedLast month a Russian national became the first foreign Bagram detainee to face an American court.
Irek Ilgiz Hamidullin, who received training as an officer and tank commander in the Soviet military in the early 1980s, was charged with 12 counts of terrorism-related offences in a court in Washington.
He faces up to life in prison if convicted.
After 2001, when the US invaded Afghanistan in response to the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington, about 30,000 foreign soldiers and civilians were housed at the former Soviet base at Bagram.
But the number has been falling and will be cut to 6,000 US troops next year.
By the end of 2016, the only US military presence in Afghanistan will be at the embassy in Kabul as President Barack Obama winds down the US combat presence in the country.
NATO's combat mission will end on December 31 this year, although some troops will remain to support the Afghan army and police, who have taken on responsibility for suppressing worsening Islamist violence nationwide.