A lawyer for an Ethiopian captive at Guantánamo, who claims he was tortured when his interrogation was outsourced to Morocco, is asking the British government to intervene and help preserve alleged CIA photos that illustrate his treatment.

Binyam Mohamed, 27, claims through his lawyer and an affidavit at the U.S. Supreme Court that interrogators sliced his chest and penis with a scalpel during 18 months in Morocco in 2002 and 2003. U.S. forces, he says, handed him over to the Moroccans, before they sent him to Guantánamo in September 2004.

Late Sunday, his attorney wrote British Foreign Secretary David Milliband asking that he intervene to preserve evidence, since Mohamed lived in Britain and sought asylum in the early 1990s.

''We can prove that a photographic record was made of this by the CIA,'' Clive Stafford Smith wrote in the letter, which copies in U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

``Through diligent investigation we know when the CIA took pictures of Mr. Mohamed's brutalized genitalia, we know the identity of the CIA agents who were present including the person who took the pictures (we know both their false identities and their true names), and we know what those pictures show.''

The CIA did not directly address whether the photos do or do not exist. But it defended the practice of outsourcing interrogations to third countries -- known as rendition -- as ``a key, lawful tool in the fight against terror.''

''The United States does not conduct or condone torture, nor does it transport anyone to other countries for the purpose of torture,'' said George Little, a spokesman for the agency.

He added: ``Rendition, which has been used on a very limited scale, has helped the United States and other nations disrupt terror plots and networks and is designed to get terrorists off the street.''

The move is the latest by lawyers reacting to CIA disclosure that it destroyed videotapes of interrogations in the cases of two suspected senior al Qaeda leaders now in military custody at Guantánamo.

Lawyers for detainees argue both that confessions obtained through torture are unreliable -- victims don't tell the truth but what interrogators want to hear -- and that evidence obtained this way must be excluded from trials under a principle known as fruit of the poisonous tree.

There is no way to independently verify the claims, especially since Smith had access to classified records in Mohamed's case as his attorney in an early aborted effort to charge him as a war criminal at a military commission. Mohamed's lawyer first described the interrogation techniques in a sworn affidavit in a 2006 U.S. Supreme Court Guantánamo detainee rights case.

''I have been privy to materials that allegedly support the finding that Mr. Mohamed should be held,'' Smith wrote in Sunday's letter to the Milliband. ``And while I cannot discuss some here (due to classification rules), I can state unequivocally that I have seen no evidence of any kind against Mr. Mohamed that is not the bitter fruit of torture.''

The request followed by days two other attorneys' motion for a federal court order to preserve evidence in the case of another Guantánamo captive ''high-value detainee'' Majid Khan, a Baltimore-area educated former U.S. resident who says he was tortured at a secret CIA site overseas.

In the Khan case, the only classified information to which Khan's attorneys had access was in their mid-October interviews with him near Camp 7, a previously secret lockup at Guantánamo.

Also Sunday, an attorney for 11 Yemeni captives at Guantánamo Bay asked a U.S. District Court judge in Washington D.C., Henry H. Kennedy Jr., to hold a hearing on whether the U.S. government destroyed evidence against their clients.

In 2005, Kennedy had ordered evidence preserved in the Yemenis' habeas corpus petitions before the Congress stripped the federal court of jurisdiction over Guantánamo detainee cases.

Smith wrote the British official as Mohamed's lawyer and legal director at Reprieve, a London-based legal group that has defended dozens of Guantánamo detainees and during the Tony Blair administration helped secure the repatriation of all the British citizens held in the prison camps in southeast Cuba.

This summer, the Gordon Brown government asked the Bush administration to return the five former British residents still held in Guantánamo, Mohamed among them. Under reported deals, four of the five will be released this month and sent to Britain and Saudi Arabia.

But not Mohamed. The Pentagon is ramping up to stage 80 or so war-crimes trials by Military Commission, and lawyers expect that Mohamed will be among them.

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