Haslar was rated very poorly in a recent Home Office report

Residents of the Immigration Removal Centre at Haslar near Gosport refused food earlier this week as a protest against conditions at the centre.

The Haslar Visitors Group says it believes that up to 25 men refused food for two days from Tuesday.

The Home Office have said that no-one is refusing food at present and that they were aware of only one person who did so earlier in the week.

Prison staff

Michael Woolley, from the Haslar Visitors' Group, questioned whether the Home Office would be able to tell whether residents were eating or not as there was no system of recording this.

He said: "Haslar was a prison and it is still staffed by prison officers, some of those officers are very good but some find it difficult to remember that they're not prison officers anymore."

Haslar is a removal centre, housing people who have been refused asylum and are awaiting the outcome of appeals.

Earlier this month a report by prison inspectors said Haslar residents were not shown enough respect and were subjected to "unacceptable and unnecessary" random strip searches.

In February, Mikhail Bodnarchuk, a Ukrainian asylum seeker, hanged himself at the centre on the day he was due to be deported after his application was rejected.