FORT MEADE: Some female guards at the Guantanamo Bay prison have filed equal opportunity complaints challenging court orders barring them from jobs that would require touching detainees while escorting them to hearings and attorney-client meetings, a military judge said Monday.

The two complaints filed with the Defence Department's Office of Diversity Management and Equal Opportunity complicate a dispute that stems from the detainees' assertion that their Muslim faith prohibits physical contact with females who are not their wives or relatives.

Some defence lawyers have argued that the government recently added women to the escort teams to humiliate the men and disrupt their ability to defend themselves.

Prosecutors have argued that barring women from escort duty would amount to gender discrimination.

The complaints were revealed Monday by Navy Captain J. Kirk Waits as he presided over a pretrial hearing for Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi at the U.S. base in Cuba.

The Associated Press watched a closed-circuit video feed of the hearing at Fort Meade, near Baltimore.

Waits said he heard on Friday about the complaint in al-Hadi's case but hadn't seen it.