Guards of the Guantanamo Bay detention center have used more torture after President Obama announced its closure, a freed prisoner claims.

Two days after taking office, Barack Obama announced he would shut down the prison this year.

"Since the election it's got harsher," Binyam Mohamed told the Mail newspaper in a Sunday interview.

"The guards would say, 'yes, this place is going to close down,' but it was like they wanted to take their last revenge," he said.

Mohamed was the first detainee to be transferred out of Guantanamo since Obama took office.

He also claimed the Emergency Reaction Force at Guantanamo, a team which he said punishes inmates in their cells and once almost gouged his eyes out when he declined to give his fingerprints, is now being used more often.

Mohamed was suspected of attending an Al-Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan and of plotting to build a radioactive "dirty bomb", but was never charged. He flew back to Britain last month since his detention in 2002.

Meanwhile, Mohamed claimed in the interview that British officials had colluded in his alleged torture.

He said while he was in Morocco in 2002, his Moroccan interrogators "started bringing British files to the interrogations... it was obvious the British were feeding them questions about people in London."

"When I realized that the British were cooperating with the people torturing me, I felt completely naked," he said. "They sold me out."

He said he subsequently made false confessions about one plot to build a "dirty" nuclear bomb and another to blow up apartments in New York linked to alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

Britain's Foreign Office released a statement in response to the claims, saying that "We abhor torture and never order it or condone it."

AGB/DT