EL SALVADOR’S President Nayib Bukele cast aside allegations this week that a US resident has been beaten and subjected to psychological torture in one of his country’s notorious mega prisons.

Kilmar Abrego Garcia, an El Salvadorian who was granted protection from deportation in the US state of Maryland in 2019, was abducted by US immigration enforcement officers in March and illegally returned to the land of his birth.

Once there, he was sent without trial to the overcrowded Terrorism Confinement Centre (CECOT), where the inmates are subjected to torture and denied access to medical services, according to human rights organisations in El Salvador and across the world.

After months of legal wrangling between the US Supreme Court and President Donald Trump’s administration, Mr Abrego Garcia was returned to the US in June. But a federal judge ordered on June 27 that he stay in prison in Tennessee for his own protection from immigration officials.

Mr Abrego Garcia’s family have launched a lawsuit against the US government over his treatment.  

Court documents filed on Wednesday say Mr Abrego Garcia suffered severe beatings, severe sleep deprivation and psychological torture during his time at CECOT.

His description matches accounts from other Salvadorans detained under President Bukele’s state of emergency, in which the government has locked up more than 1 per cent of the Central American nation’s population in a supposed war on gangs.

In a social media post on Thursday, Mr Bukele claimed that Mr Abrego Garcia “wasn’t tortured, nor did he lose weight.”

If he had been tortured, “sleep-deprived, and starved, why does he look so well in every picture?” the president asked.