NEW DELHI, Nov 18: A leading human rights group on Tuesday called for Indian police to be punished for torturing Muslim men detained after bomb attacks in a southern city last year.

Human Rights Watch said close to 100 Muslim men were arrested after the city of Hyderabad was bombed in May and August 2007, and that the Andhra Pradesh state government later admitted that 21 of the suspects had been tortured.

The rights group said the victims had been offered compensation of $600 each, but called for the police who beat and electrocuted the men to be prosecuted.

“Acknowledging torture and providing compensation is a good first step,” said Meenakshi Ganguly, senior South Asia researcher at Human Rights Watch.

“But the government has to prosecute those responsible so that those who use torture will not get away with it.” Human Rights Watch said some of the detainees were stripped, beaten, hung upside down and given electric shocks. The suspects were also threatened with the torture of their female relatives, it said.

“Over and over again, the police response to terrible bombings has been to round up people, simply because they happen to be Muslim, and to torture them in the hope of securing information or confessions,” Ganguly said.

“This stigmatises and alienates an entire community.” India was also hit by a wave of bomb attacks this year, with some of the blasts claimed by a little-known Islamist group calling itself the “Indian Mujahedeen.”

In September, the chief cleric at India's largest mosque, the Jama Masjid in New Delhi, complained to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh that police were murdering Muslims and passing off the killings as gunbattles.

He also said that Indian Muslims, who number between 135 million and 140 million in Hindu-majority India, “have no faith in the police.” Police in New Delhi also came under the spotlight, with a court in the capital told Monday that officials from the city's crack anti-terror unit had framed two Muslim men as terrorists.

Federal investigators called for the prosecution of three Delhi Police officials for fabricating evidence against the two men, who have been in jail since February 2006.

Police had claimed they had arrested the men with arms and explosives.

One of the three officials was also involved in a controversial gunbattle in New Delhi in September, in which two suspected Muslim militants and a policeman were killed, media reports said.—AFP