Cameron urged to help Guantanamo detainee Belbacha

Mr Belbacha, who has languished in Guantanamo for nine years without charge, faces forced transfer to Algeria by the US administration, where he faces imprisonment and potential torture.

Reprieve is asking that Britain offer him a home in Bournemouth, where he lived and worked for three years after fleeing his native country.

Cleared for release under the Bush administration, Mr Belbacha is left in limbo, too terrified to return to Algeria but with no other country prepared to offer him sanctuary.

He was not included in a re-patriation deal struck by the Blair government to bring British Guantanamo prisoners back to this country. Britain insisted he had no rightful claim to live in Britain because his asylum appeal was "pending" when he was arrested.

Reprieve director Clive Stafford Smith said: "The moral poverty of the Labour government's stance on Ahmed was stunning, and we hope the coalition will do the right thing by this very unlucky prisoner.

"It is precisely because Ahmed was a British resident that British intelligence agents interrogated him in Kandahar, when he was undergoing shocking abuse by the Americans.

"To this day he breaks down to recall the torture he suffered there. UK agents came again to question him in Guantanamo during its earliest, most brutal days.

"We know full well that the British then shared this tainted intelligence with the United States - and that it was used to justify Ahmed's detention. How, then, can we rightly claim that we do not owe him his freedom?"

Amnesty International UK director Kate Allen explained: "There's no question in our minds that if Ahmed Belbacha is sent to Algeria his life and liberty could be at risk.

"He's now in the horrible position of facing further imprisonment without charge at Guantanamo or the possibility of arbitrary detention and torture in Algeria.

"In the past Belbacha has lived in the UK and we're urging the government to allow him to be released to Britain as a humanitarian gesture."

A spokesman for the Foreign Office said it would consider the the letter but that Mr Belbacha's detention and release was "a matter for the US."