Britain said its security services worked to avoid colluding in mistreatment of terrorism suspects held overseas, after a report from lawmakers yesterday expressed concern about cooperation with foreign intelligence agencies.

Foreign Minister David Miliband and Interior Minister Alan Johnson defended Britain's intelligence links with countries where detainees are at risk of torture or other abuse in a joint newspaper article.

"All the most serious plots and attacks in the UK in this decade have had significant links abroad. Our agencies must work with their equivalents overseas. So we have to work hard to ensure that we do not collude in torture or mistreatment," the ministers wrote in The Sunday Telegraph.

Britain has been at heightened risk of terrorism with overseas links since the 9/11 attacks in the US. On July 7, 2005, suicide bombers said to have received training in Pakistan killed 52 other passengers on London's public transport system.

Britain has intensified foreign intelligence efforts since then, but rights groups have criticised it for not pressing more effectively against ill-treatment of detainees held by allies.

Lawmakers on the foreign affairs committee of Britain's lower house of parliament singled out Britain's close links with Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence Agency (ISI) as a special worry in a report yesterday.

"While the UK must, by necessity, maintain its relationship with Pakistani intelligence, we are very concerned by allegations that the nature of the relationship UK officials have with the ISI may have led them to be complicit in torture," the legislators said in their cross-party human rights report.

Continuing to use information from foreign intelligence agencies that had ignored past British requests to stop torturing suspects could constitute collusion in the torture itself, the lawmakers warned the government.

"Use of evidence which may have been obtained under torture on a regular basis, especially where it is not clear that protestations about mistreatment have elicited any change in behaviour by foreign intelligence services, could be construed as complicity in such behaviour," the report said.

Attorney General Patricia Scotland said in March there were sufficient grounds to launch a criminal investigation into allegations by British resident Binyam Mohamed that intelligence officers were complicit in his torture in Morocco before he was sent to the US detention camp at Guantanamo Bay.

The foreign affairs committee report follows a similar one from parliament's human rights committee on August 4, which called for a full independent inquiry into allegations of British complicity in torture. Mr Miliband and Mr Johnson said Britain's cooperation was sometimes a fine judgment call and had been halted in some cases because the risk of mistreatment was too high.