Italian magistrates have opened an investigation into allegations by an undercover reporter that police abused and humiliated illegal immigrants at a detention centre on a Mediterranean island.

Journalist Fabrizio Gatti published his shocking account of the Lampedusa holding centre in the left-leaning magazine L'espresso, which came out on Friday.

Magistrates decided at the weekend to look into the claims and the Interior Ministry announced its chief immigration official, Alessandro Pansa, would review the Lampedusa centre.

Mr Gatti disguised himself as a Kurdish refugee in late September and pretended that he had washed up on Lampedusa, a tiny island some 185 kilometres from Tunisia that draws thousands of illegal immigrants every year.

He was soon picked up and taken to the detention centre, which is off bounds for journalists and has been described as "squalid" by the UN refugee agency, UNHCR. Photographs in L'espresso show him peering out of the barbed-wire compound.

Mr Gatti said he spent the next seven days in the centre and described how some new arrivals were forced to strip naked by military police (carabinieri) who then slapped them.

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