E/CN.4/2001/66/Add.1 page 6 with respect to nine types of crimes, a prosecutor could legally prolong the period of investigation up to 18 months. The General Prosecutor recognized that prosecutors may sometimes facilitate wrongdoing by the police by, for example, extending this period of preliminary detention. He believed that this was due to the mentality inherited from the previous regime. 12. At the end of this 3- to 10-day period, the person should be either released, or charged and sent to an investigative isolator under the Ministry of Justice’s jurisdiction. Detainees met by the Special Rapporteur during his visits to remand centres said that they had been detained in provisional detention wards between 3 and 15 days. Most had been detained for more than the normal period of three days. Most allegations of torture received by the Special Rapporteur concerned the preliminary period of detention of suspects in these wards. As indicated above, there exist only four such wards in Baku, i.e. at the Baku City Police Department (“Gorotdel”), at the Ministry of National Security, at the Department to Combat Organized Crime and at the Narimanov Police Department, and the Special Rapporteur visited them all during the mission. 13. The Minister of Internal Affairs transmitted to the Special Rapporteur various orders he had issued in March 2000 in the field of the protection of human rights by law enforcement agencies. These orders clearly spell out the international guarantees and standards with respect to the treatment of persons under arrest. He also called for the conditions of detention in police stations and provisional detention facilities under his jurisdiction to be improved. 14. The General Prosecutor indicated that the monitoring of both police station and provisional detention wards was undertaken by his own Office. He referred to a large number of arbitrary detention cases and mentioned one specific case of torture (a person beaten to death) in which the investigator of the prosecutor’s office had been dismissed for not having prevented the acts in question. Criminal charges were said to be pending against the responsible police officers. (a) Police stations 15. On 9 May, the Special Rapporteur visited the Baku City Nizami district police office. Nobody was held there at that time. Only 26 persons had been taken to this police office during the preceding four months. From the register, it was clear that a majority of persons had been detained in this police station for more than the legally permitted three-hour period for identification purposes. It was explained to the Special Rapporteur that those detentions had been requested by the investigators and approved by the prosecutor’s office. There was nevertheless no mention of such authorization in the register. According to the officer-in-charge of this office, such authorization was kept with the investigators’ files on the suspects. It was also argued that most of these persons had not been formally detained, i.e. held in cells, but simply interrogated in the investigators’ offices. 16. The Special Rapporteur then visited unit No. 25 which comes under the jurisdiction of the above-mentioned district police office. Persons arrested were reportedly held behind the reception desk in a basic, but ventilated and lighted room. The Special Rapporteur nevertheless