THE BRITISH Government is to send a former Saudi prisoner to world experts in an effort to prove he was tortured by authorities while in jail.

Les Walker languished in jail for two years and claims he was brutally beaten and mentally abused during this time.

Now the Foreign Office has agreed to pay to send him to the Parker Institute in Copenhagen for extensive psychological and physical tests.

If they prove his claims the report will be used as evidence in Mr Walker's legal fight for compensation against his alleged Saudi abusers.

Mr Walker said: "These tests will show the physical effects my body has suffered from the torture.

"I will also see psychologists and they will draw up reports on what I went throug."

Mr Walker will travel to the institute, the world leader in the diagnosis and treatment of torture, at the end of this month.

Mr Walker spent 13 months in solitary confinement in a tiny cell when he was first jailed.

The only human contact was with the guards who he claims came in to brutalise him. He is still undergoing dental treatment because of damage they allegedly caused to his teeth.

He also told how the guards would beat him with a stick or a pick-axe handle and stand on his scrotum while he was chained to the door.

If he was taken out of his cell he was blindfolded, handcuffed and shackled.

After 13 months, he was suddenly transferred to a cell with fellow prisoner Sandy Mitchell, a Scot who had lived in Liverpool, who had been sentenced to execution for his supposed involvement in bombings.

The men were freed after King Fahd pardoned them in August

2003. Since then they have been locked in legal battles.

Mr Walker and others won the right to sue over their torture claims after a legal battle in the court of appeal last year.

Mr Walker and the other men were arrested in Riyadh after a series of bomb attacks on Westerners in 2000, which the Saudi authorities said were part of a turf war between rival illegal alcohol runners. He was sentenced to 12 years. The men always insisted they were innocent.

But the Saudi government has denied they were tortured into confessing to the bombings, which killed Briton Christopher Rodway and an American working in the country.

Father-of-two Mr Walker, who grew up in Heswall, still suffers from flashbacks and is too ill to work.

He now lives in a modest council flat in Neston and survives on £50 a week benefits.

A spokesman for the Foreign Office said: "We have concerns about their treatment while they were detained and feel it is now appropriate to send Mr Walker to the Parker Institute where a full investigation can be carried out."

samlister@dailypost.co.uk