Reprieve: Disgraced firm L3 supporting drone strikes

It emerged this week that Engility Corporation - a subsidiary of L3 Communications until last year - has paid out around $5m (£3.1m) to 71 people it held at Baghdad's notorious Abu Ghraib jail.

And Reprieve said L3 is one of the main subcontractors involved in producing Predator drones, used by the CIA to kill "suspected militants" in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.

The "targeted" strikes by unmanned aircraft have killed up to 3,457 people in Pakistan alone since 2004 and as many as 891 were civilians, according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.

The latest attack today killed five people in Pakistan's North Waziristan tribal region.

Security officials said that all the dead were militants, though their identities could not be immediately ascertained and such reports often turn out to be false.

The use of weaponised drones in non-war zones is widely considered to be illegal.

Reprieve director Clive Stafford Smith wrote to L3 in September, warning the company that it was complicit in the deaths and trauma caused by providing the satellite data links for Predators.

Reprieve's Catherine Gilfedder said L3 was the "go-to company" for the US's war on terror.

She said: "Far from being disgraced by allegations of horrific torture and abuse, L3 continues to provide support to the US drone programme, which terrorises hundreds of thousands of civilians around the world."