US forces in Afghanistan on Sunday freed 81 Taliban prisoners from a jail at the Bagram air base, north of capital Kabul. An Afghan Supreme Court official had said earlier that the men were released from the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. However, the chief justice said the suspects never left Afghanistan. "They have been released from Bagram," Chief Justice Fazl Hadi Shinwari told reporters. "We will give them clothes and then send them home." He said US authorities had said they would free their remaining Afghan prisoners. "There are another 400 Taliban in Bagram and they [the US military] have promised to release all Taliban from Bagram and Guantanamo Bay," he said. US forces captured hundreds prisoners when it toppled Afghanistan's Taliban government in late 2001 for failing to surrender al Qaeda leader Osama bin Ladin. Prisoners deemed to be the greatest security risk were taken, bound and shackled, to Guantanamo Bay while others were kept at US bases across Afghanistan. Accusations of mistreatment of prisoners have dogged US military jails from Iraq, to Afghanistan and its base in Cuba. "I have very bad memories of the interrogation because they were torturing us," said Abdul Manan, 35, from Kunar, in eastern Afghanistan. Manan was among the prisoners released on Sunday. "But after the interrogation period was over, everything was all right," he told reporters outside the Supreme Court in Kabul. A Taliban spokesman said all Afghan prisoners should be freed. "All the prisoners under the custody of the Americans either inside or outside Afghanistan, they are innocent people, they are not Taliban," Taliban spokesman Abdul Latif Hakimi told Reuters by satellite telephone. "The Americans are torturing and harming those innocent people in their jails." About 18,000 US troops still are based in Afghanistan, engaged in the hunt for al-Qaeda and Taliban remnants. **PHOTO CAPTION*** Former Afghan detainees make their way to the Supreme Court in Kabul. (AFP)