A pilot wrongly accused of training the 9/11 hijackers has lost his fight for compensation for his ordeal.
Lotfi Raissi was detained for nearly five months at London’s Belmarsh prison after being arrested following the 2001 attacks in the United States.
Two High Court judges ruled against his challenge to the government’s decision to deem him ineligible for a Home Office compensation scheme for wrongful detention, on grounds that Raissi’s detention was as part of an extradition case that was not ‘in the domestic criminal process’.
Speaking after the ruling, Raissi said: ‘The Metropolitan Police and the Crown Prosecution Service are “domestic”, and they played a key role in the extradition proceedings by wrongly naming me as an international terrorist and by ensuring that I spent almost five months in Belmarsh.
‘The court’s decision allows the home secretary to ignore the part played by those public bodies in ruining my life.
‘I have no choice but to keep my faith in British justice and pray that it won’t be too much longer in coming.
‘The reality is that because of my profile of being Algerian, Muslim, Arabic and an airline pilot, I suffered this miscarriage of justice.’
