OTTAWA - Canada's torture monitor in Afghanistan admitted Tuesday there was a two-month gap in detainee interviews, despite evidence just months earlier that prisoners were being abused.

The Canadian Forces stopped transferring detainees to Afghan authorities in November, 2007, after Nicholas Gosselin, an embassy official, interviewed a Canadian-transferred detainee and saw signs of torture and even the electrical cable used to whip him.

But Gosselin's interviews ended by the next spring because he just didn't have enough time in the National Directorate of Security facility to accomplish all of the government's goals, he told the Military Police Complaints Commission. It's risky to travel around Kandahar, so the Canadian team sometimes had as little as an hour to meet with officials and work on reconstruction projects, he said. In other cases, there were no Canadian-transferred detainees there.

But the less intensive visits may have made a difference. In over 38 visits from March to August, Gosselin reported two cases of abuse, compared to six cases he found in November.

Commission member Roy Berlinquette pushed Gosselin about why the interviews stopped.

³The question is important because in the media at the time there were allusions to visits, which led us to believe there were interviews,² said Berlinquette.

The unannounced visits and interviews were part of a revised 2007 detainee agreement, which the Tories pointed to as evidence they improved the safety of prisoners post-transfer.

But Gosselin said with their limited time, he was at least able to see the detainees ³In a perfect world, in Canada, it would have been possible to do them in a systematic manner, but that was not the reality on the ground in Afghanistan,² he said.

Gosselin's reports, tabled Monday at the public hearings into the role of military police in detainee transfers, show no Canadian-transferred detainees between April and the end of July, the height of Taliban fighting season.

laura.payton@sunmedia.ca