THE DETAINEE FILES: Canada's top soldier wants to know fate of missing Afghan reports

OTTAWA — Canada's top soldier says he's working to get to the bottom of what happened to reports from a senior Canadian diplomat in Afghanistan, which repeatedly warned that Afghan detainees turned over to local authorities risked being tortured.

Gen. Walter Natynczyk, chief of defence staff, said Friday he did not yet know where the diplomat's reports landed back in Ottawa, who read them, and what was done with the information.

"That's why I want to see the forensics, what actually happened," Natynczyk said in an exclusive interview with Global National in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Natynczyk weighed in on the same day Prime Minister Stephen Harper added his name to a list of senior Conservatives who say they were kept in the dark about the warnings — issued in 2006 and 2007 — that Afghan detainees might face torture once they were surrendered to local authorities.

Harper told reporters in Toronto he didn't see the reports from diplomat Richard Colvin "at the time," which said, among other things, he had seen first-hand evidence of abuse and torture while visiting Afghan detainees in jail in June 2007.

Earlier this week, Defence Minister Peter MacKay and his predecessor, Gordon O'Connor, said they'd never heard a word about Colvin's reports.

Colvin's take on the treatment of Afghan detainees was revealed Wednesday when an affidavit he swore on the matter was unsealed by the Military Police Complaints Commission.

In the affidavit, Colvin says he wrote and widely distributed his formal and informal reports to top bureaucrats at the departments of foreign affairs and national defence, as well as to the senior military chain of command.

He said he began filing reports in May 2006 soon after he arrived in Afghanistan.

In the first of his 19 reports, Colvin warned of "serious, imminent and alarming" concerns that detainees were being abused after being put into Afghan hands.

When media reports surfaced in 2007 of abuse of Afghan prisoners, Harper and his ministers said they had no credible evidence that Canadian soldiers were knowingly surrendering their captives to face possible torture in Afghan prisons.

In his Toronto remarks, Harper defended his government's handling of the issue since the controversy erupted.

"We put a new transfer agreement — Afghan prisoner agreement — in place with the Afghan government. It's two and a half years ago now, I think. So we have acted on these findings long since these reports," Harper said.

Colvin's affidavit was released just hours before Peter Tinsley, chairman of the complaints commission, suspended indefinitely his inquiry into the handling of Afghan detainees on grounds the federal government had refused to provide relevant documents to help implicated military personnel mount a defence of their actions.