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(Belfast Telegraph) – The UK Government has repeatedly insisted it was not aware Mr Mohamed, a former Guantanamo detainee, was in Morocco and Afghanistan in 2002 and 2003, a year before being taken to the prison camp. But documents shown to the High Court yesterday suggested an MI5 officer, known as “Witness B”, had made three visits to Morocco during the period Mr Mohamed, right, alleges he was held and tortured there.
Describing it as a “strange coincidence”, human rights charity Reprieve said the revised judgment revealed that British secret services made a far greater contribution to Mr Mohamed’s interrogation than they originally admitted.
Reprieve’s director Clive Stafford Smith said: “The British agents clearly committed perjury when telling the court that they did not know of Binyam’s illegal detention at a CIA ‘black site’ and that all efforts to question Binyam ended in February 2003. How high up in the British Government did this sordid truth travel?”
The global "spider web" of secret detentions
Chairman of the House of Commons Select Committee, Keith Vaz, called for an official explanation into the officer’s role, while shadow Foreign Secretary William Hague said that until the Government disclosed the role of the officer in Morocco, the “damaging impression that Britain may have been complicit in torture will not be dispelled”.
Mr Mohamed, 30, a former UK resident who was arrested in Pakistan in 2002, alleges that during three months of detention he was tortured by Pakistani agents.
He says he was then taken to Morocco on an “extraordinary rendition” mission by the CIA with the explicit knowledge of the British security service. During further torture in Morocco, he says, he became aware that his torturers were being fed questions and material from British intelligence agents. The Government denies the claims.
(Reprieve) – Binyam Mohamed was born on 24 July, 1978, in Ethiopia, and came to the UK on 9 March 1994, seeking political asylum. Binyam travelled to Pakistan and then Afghanistan in June 2001 primarily because he wanted to escape a social circle in London that had led him into drug addiction.
With Afghanistan in chaos after 9/11, Binyam left for Pakistan. The situation there, however, proved equally unstable; neither place showed any sign of improving. So in April 2002 Binyam decided to return home to the UK. He was apprehended at Karachi airport for a passport violation. After three months of detention and abuse in Pakistan, Binyam was handed over to the US military, who rendered him to Morocco.
In Morocco, Binyam endured eighteen months of shocking torture, including being repeatedly sliced across his body and genitals with a razor blade. In January 2004 Binyam was shipped to further torture in the “Dark Prison” in Afghanistan, before being brought to Guantánamo Bay in September 2004.
He has recently been released from Guantánamo and has returned to the UK.
Human Cargo (pdf) is an account of the horrific torture and abuse that Binyam Mohamed underwent in various “black sites” around the world before he arrived at Guantánamo Bay. Further, this report exposes the “anatomy” of a typical US rendition operation, based on Reprieve’s detailed investigation into Binyam’s rendition flight from Morocco to Afghanistan in January 2004. It reveals that in the space of just eight days, at least seven individuals – Binyam Mohamed, German citizen Khaled El-Masri, and five others – were rendered by the same rendition crew.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."
