UK resident Binyam Mohamed, recently freed from Guantanamo Bay, has called for ex-US President Bush to be put on trial over his rendition and torture and, if there is enough evidence, the former UK Premier Blair as well.
Mohamed said he would not have faced torture or extraordinary rendition but for British involvement in his case.
In an interview with the BBC yesterday, Mohamed said justice will in part be served by placing on trial ‘whoever signed the documents for my rendition’.
He said that US interrogators told him: ‘This is the British file and this is the American file.’
Mohamed was detained in Pakistan, over an alleged forged passport.
In July 2002 he was flown to a secret site in Morocco where he says he was tortured.
He said he was interviewed for three hours in Pakistan by an MI5 officer calling himself John whose role, according to Mohamed, was to support the US interrogators.
He said that 70 per cent of questions put to him had to have come from sources in the UK. He was asked to identify individuals in CCTV images of people going into mosques.
Mohamed told the BBC interviewer: ‘If it wasn’t for the British involvement right at the beginning of the interrogations in Pakistan, and suggestions that were made by MI5 to the Americans of how to get me to respond, I don’t think I would have gone to Morocco.
‘It was that initial help that MI5 gave to America that led me through the seven years of what I went through.’
He added that local officers in Morocco asked him questions supplied by British intelligence operatives and showing him hundreds of photographs of Muslim men living in the UK.
He said: ‘The interrogator who was showing me the file would say, “This is the British file and this is the American file”.’
In January 2004, Mohamed said he was taken to a place he calls the ‘dark prison’ in Kabul, the Afghan capital, where he said he almost lost his mind.
This place is the notorious Bagram prison camp.
There, he said he was put in a dark cell with just a blanket on the floor, hung by his wrists and subjected to loud rap music 24 hours a day for a month.
Mohamed said: ‘In the “dark prison” I was literally dead. I didn’t exist. I wasn’t there. There was no day, there was no night.’
Following his experiences in Kabul, Mohamed signed a confession only because he was told he would be flown back to the ‘dark prison’ if he didn’t co-operate.
Shortly after this he was sent to Guantanamo Bay.
He claimed abuses at the camp on Cuba had increased since President Obama announced his intention to close it within a year.
Mohamed’s immigration status is currently under review.
The UK attorney general is continuing a review into whether to ask police to investigate allegations of British collusion in Mohamed’s mistreatment.
• The Menzies Aviation Company Secretary John Geddes yesterday confirmed that baggage handler Jalal Ahmed has been suspended from his job, pending an internal review, after being seen demonstrating against British troops, back from Iraq, parading in Luton.
Geddes also confirmed that Ahmed’s ‘airside’ pass has been withdrawn, while admitting he is fully security cleared and has done nothing wrong at work.
