Years of inadequate training by the United Nations have contributed to a pattern of abuses including torture and rape by East Timor’s police that has become one of the nascent nation’s “most worrying human rights problems”, according to a report.

The account, by New York-based Human Rights Watch, due to be released today, accuses the police of arbitrary detentions, beatings, torture and rape. It warns that without the intervention of international donors and the East Timorese government the police risk slipping into “an endemic culture of abuse and impunity”. The allegations are the latest in a growing list of shortcomings attributed to the UN’s nation-building exercise in East Timor, often held up by senior UN officials as a success story.