(AFP) – Jul 16, 2008

WASHINGTON (AFP) — A former driver for Osama bin Laden, Salim Ahmed Hamdan, whose trial is set to open at the US base in Guantanamo, Cuba, claims he was abused and subjected to grim conditions there, US media reported Wednesday.

A federal judge was to decide Friday whether Hamdan's trial, the first since the US "war-on-terror" prison camp was opened in late 2001 at its naval base in Cuba, would go ahead on schedule. Meanwhile preliminary hearings were under way this week.

The New York Times reported that the Yemeni national, who has spent six years at the prison camp, said that on his transfer to Guantanamo his eyes were bandaged and his body restrained in a way that aggravated a back injury.

"Such severe pain, I cannot really explain," he was quoted as saying.

US media at the base said Salim Hamdan testified Tuesday how he was humiliated by a woman interrogator.

She "came close to me, she came very close, with her whole body towards me. I couldn't do anything. I was afraid of the soldiers," The Washington Post reported.

"I said to her, 'What do you want?'". "She said 'I want you to answer all of my questions,'" the paper quoted him as saying.

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