CAIRO ø Egypt has been accused of holding more than 1,000 suspected Islamic insurgents without formal charges.

The Egyptian Human Rights Association for the Assistance of Prisoners said many of these inmates have undergone torture in overcrowded prisons.

The group, in a 229-page annual report, said six people have died of torture in Egyptian prisons.

The group said Egyptian authorities have ignored court rulings to release those being held without trial. Hundreds of suspected Islamic insurgents were ordered free by Egyptian courts.

"In most of these cases we won court orders to set them free," the director of the association, Mohammed Zarei, said. "But the authorities ignored those orders and they are still being kept in detention cells for no reason."

Over the last year, Egyptian authorities have detained hundreds of suspected members of the Muslim Brotherhood. Dozens of Brotherhood detainees were accused of training insurgents in such places as Chechnya, Israel, Jordan as part of a drive to overthrow the regime of President Hosni Mubarak.

The report also detailed conditions in the Egypt's prisons. The group asserted that more than 300 prisoners were being denied vital medical care and that authorities were preventing inmates from seeing visiting family members.

"They believe that prisoners don't deserve the least level of medical care, proper nutrition or ventilation in their cells," Zarei told a news conference on July 12.

Egypt's Interior Ministry has dismissed the report. Officials cited the prosecution of several officers charged with participating in torture.