The Foreign Office was accused of hounding a whistleblower yesterday after a civil servant was cleared of leaking confidential documents relating to the government's policy on radical Islam, including its knowledge of the US policy of "extraordinary rendition" of terrorist suspects.

Derek Pasquill was facing six counts of breaching the Officials Secrets Act for allegedly passing on information about rendition and the government's contacts with extremist Muslim groups to the Observer newspaper and the New Statesman magazine.