MacKay denies seeing Afghan torture reports

Defence Minister Peter MacKay says he never saw a former diplomat's reports containing allegations of torture of detainees transferred by Canadians to Afghan prisons.

MacKay, who was foreign minister at the time, insisted Thursday that he knew nothing of the documents.

"I have not seen those reports in either my capacity as minister of National Defence or previously as minister of Foreign Affairs," MacKay told The Canadian Press in a telephone interview from Halifax

"I can't speak for other ministers."

MacKay’s denial follows the release of an affidavit to the Military Police Complaints Commission and made public Wednesday.

In the affidavit, former senior diplomat Richard Colvin said that he wrote a memo in 2006 to senior military and Foreign Affairs officials describing what he thought were "serious, imminent and alarming" problems with the handling of detainees by Afghan security forces.

Colvin, who also worked in Kabul, said he wrote about 16 more memos about the issue over the next year and a half.

In one of the memos, Colvin, who is now an intelligence officer at the Canadian Embassy in Washington, outlined specific allegations of torture made by a detainee transferred to an Afghan prison by Canadian soldiers.

But when the allegations of abuse surfaced in 2007, Prime Minister Stephen Harper described them as "baseless."

Stockwell Day, who at the time was public safety minister and in charge of Corrections Canada staff in Kandahar, said the abuse reports were "false allegations" and accused the opposition in the House of Commons of believing Taliban propaganda.

For more than two years, the Military Police Complaints Commission has been investigating what the government knew about the torture allegations.