LONDON: A Guantanamo prisoner who claims he was tortured at a covert CIA site in Morocco returned to Britain a free man yesterday after nearly seven years in US captivity — the first inmate from the US prison camp freed since President Barack Obama took office. Binyam Mohamed flew into a British military base and was expected to be out of custody within hours.
Mohamed’s claims of torture, abuse and extraordinary rendition are at the heart of several lawsuits. Lawyers on both sides of the Atlantic are suing for secret documents they say prove the United States sent Mohamed to Morocco and that Britain knew of the mistreatment — a violation under the 1994 UN Convention Against Torture.
“I have been through an experience that I never thought to encounter in my darkest nightmares,” Mohamed said in a statement released by his attorneys.
“Before this ordeal, ‘torture’ was an abstract word to me ... It is still difficult for me to believe that I was abducted, hauled from one country to the next, and tortured in medieval ways all orchestrated by the United States government.” He said he wasn’t yet “physically nor mentally capable of facing the media.” British authorities said he would undergo interviews with the police, border control agents and immigration officials, who would help him apply for temporary residency.
His lawyers said they would provide money for his accommodations and living expenses.
Mohamed’s case could have far-reaching legal implications for the Obama administration and Britain, America’s closest partner during its war on terror.
US Attorney General Eric Holder is due at the Guantanamo detention center as the Obama administration weighs what is needed to shut the facility down.
“The friendship and assistance of the international community is vitally important as we work to close Guantanamo, and we greatly appreciate the efforts of the British government to work with us on the transfer of Binyam Mohammed,” Holder said in a statement.
Britain’s Attorney General has opened an investigation into whether there was criminal wrongdoing on the part of Britain or a British security agent from MI5 who interrogated Mohamed in Pakistan, where he was arrested in 2002. Two senior British judges, meanwhile, have reopened a case into whether 42 secret US intelligence documents shared with Britain should be made public.
Several other lawsuits are under way in the United States against a Boeing subsidiary that allegedly supplied planes for rendition flights to Morocco and for the disclosure of Bush-era legal memos on renditions and interrogation tactics.
The United States has refused to account for the 18 months Mohamed says he was in Morocco.
“I am so glad and so happy, more than words can express,” Mohamed’s sister, Zuhra Mohamed, said yesterday.
The 30-year-old Ethiopian refugee has few remaining links to Britain. His brother and sister live in the United States. His parents are said to be back in Ethiopia. And his British residency that he obtained when he was teenager has since expired.
Any revelations from the lawsuits could be particularly damaging for the British government, which unlike the Obama administration, doesn’t have its predecessors to blame.
“I assure you that we have done everything by the law,” Prime Minister Gordon Brown told reporters last week when faced with questions over Mohamed’s case.
