Cairo - Men detained on charges of plotting attacks in Egypt on behalf of the Lebanese group Hezbollah have alleged they were tortured in custody, their lawyer said Friday.

Rights lawyer Abdel-Moneim Abdel-Maqsud, who said he was representing some of the 49 men whom Egypt's public prosecutor on Wednesday accused of plotting attacks on behalf of Hezbollah, told the German news agency, dpa that one of the men had been tortured so badly that he was sent to hospital "half-paralysed."

Abdel-Maqsud, the director of the Cairo's Sawasya Centre for Human Rights, said the man, whose name he gave, had told him that State Security interrogators had thrown cold water over the detainees and left them naked in hyper-airconditioned rooms for more than 24 hours.

The lawyer's remarks to dpa came two days after two sources in the Egyptian Interior Ministry had told dpa that Egypt's domestic intelligence service, State Security Investigations, had in December detained 49 men, including 41 Egyptians, seven Palestinians with Israeli passports, and one Lebanese man, on charges of providing support to Hezbollah and Hamas.

In a statement released Wednesday evening, Egypt's public prosecutor, Abdel-Magid Mohammed, accused Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah of dispatching agents to Egypt during Israel's offensive in the Gaza Strip.

"Investigations revealed that Nasrallah had dispatched the agents after his speech (soon after the beginning of Israel's offensive)... and that he had planned to incite the people and military forces to rebel against the regime," Egypt's public prosecutor said Wednesday.

In his speech soon after Israel began its offensive in the Gaza Strip, Nasrallah had called on Egyptians to come into the streets "by the millions" to press the government to open Egypt's border with the Gaza Strip.

"I do not call for a coup in Egypt - I am in no position to call for a coup in Egypt," Nasrallah said. "But I call on generals and officers to tell their political leaders that the honour of the military... prevents them from guarding Israel's border while watching our people being slaughtered in Gaza."

The militants were to recruit local agents to conduct attacks, to incite the people and the armed forces to revolt, to spy on Egypt and to smuggle weapons and cash to Hamas in the Gaza Strip, Egypt's public prosecutor said on Wednesday.

The statement added that the prosecutor had received "certain information" from Egypt's domestic intelligence service, State Security Investigations, that a Hezbollah cell had rented apartments overlooking the Suez Canal in order to spy on traffic through the canal.

It also accused them of spying on resorts in Sinai, and renting rooms in fashionable districts where Hezbollah agents held training workshops on spreading Shiite thought in Egypt.

Abdel-Maqsud, who is best known for his past defence of detainees from Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, on Friday told dpa he was acting on behalf of five of the detainees. He called on the authorities to allow families of the detainees to visit their relatives in prison.

Many Egyptian rights lawyers have sought to represent the detainees, but on Friday it was not clear if any had been formally named in court papers as the defence lawyers in the case.

Secular rights lawyer Ahmed Seif al-Islam, director of Cairo's Hisham Mubarak Legal Centre, told dpa he had filed a formal petition to represent the men, but that he had not yet had a response.

On Wednesday, Islamist lawyer Montasser al-Zayat, formerly a member of the Islamist group Gamaa al-Islamiya and a former associate of al-Qaeda deputy lawyer Ayman al-Zawahiri, told dpa that a member of one of the detainees, a Lebanese man, had asked him to represent them.

"The allegations that the group propagated Hezbollah ideology are unfounded," al-Zayat told