Guantanamo detainee freed after 4 years in prison

[David]

AP


LONDON – A former British resident who claims he was tortured at a covert CIA site in Morocco was freed from Guantanamo after nearly seven years in U.S. captivity without facing trial.

Binyam Mohamed, the first Guantanamo prisoner released since President Barack Obama took office, returned Monday to a British military base and was expected to be out of custody within hours. The Ethiopian's case has raised questions about torture and secrecy for the British and U.S. governments, which face related lawsuits on both sides of the Atlantic.

"I hope you will understand that after everything I've been through, I am neither physically nor mentally capable of facing the media on the moment on my arrival back to Britain," Mohamed said in a statement released through his attorneys before his plane landed. He was expected to have brief interviews with police and immigration officials before his release.

The 30-year-old Mohamed 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 the British residency that he obtained when he was teenager expired while he was in detention — he must apply again.

British and American lawyers are suing for secret documents they say prove the United States sent Mohamed to Morocco where he was tortured and prove that Britain knew of the mistreatment — a violation under the 1994 U.N. Convention Against Torture.

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 U.S. 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.

Any revelations from the lawsuits could be particularly damaging for the British government, which unlike the Obama administration, cannot blame its predecessors. Prime Minister Gordon Brown's Labour Party has been in power for more than a decade.

"I assure you that we have done everything by the law," Brown told reporters last week.

Foreign Secretary David Miliband said Britain has been asking for the return of former residents in the U.S. prison camp at Guantanamo since 2007.

"We very much welcome President Obama's commitment to close Guantanamo Bay and I see today's return of Binyam Mohamed as the first step toward that shared goal," Miliband said.

Mohamed's family came to London from Ethiopia in 1994, applying for asylum following the ouster of Marxist dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam.

Schooled in West London, Mohamed worked as a janitor and later became a student of electrical engineering before converting to Islam in 2001.

Shortly afterward, he said he went to Pakistan and Afghanistan to escape a bad circle of London friends and experience an Islamic society. He was detained in the Pakistani port city of Karachi in 2002 for using a false passport to return to Britain.

For three months, he says he was tortured by Pakistani agents, who hung him for a week by a leather strap around his wrists. He says at least one MI5 officer questioned him there.

He claims he was handed over to U.S. authorities in July 2002, and then sent to Morocco where he was tortured for 18 months. According to his account, one of his foreign interrogators slashed his penis with a scalpel.

Many of the estimated 750 detainees who have passed through Guantanamo prison camp since it opened in January 2002 have reported mental and physical abuse, but few have detailed such sustained physical and mental abuse at an alleged CIA covert site.

Mohamed claims he eventually confessed to an array of charges to stop his abuse — a confession that laid the groundwork for his transfer to another CIA site in Afghanistan, where he said he was starved and beaten before being sent to Guantanamo in 2004.

The United States refuses to account for Mohamed's whereabouts for 18 months but has previously denied sending terror suspects to countries with track records of torture. British authorities, such as former Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, have said they depended on those U.S. assurances.

"He is a victim who has suffered more than any human being should ever suffer," said Clive Stafford Smith, one of his lawyers.

In May 2008, Mohamed was charged with conspiring with al-Qaida members to murder and commit terrorism. He was also accused in a "dirty bomb" plot to fill U.S. apartments with natural gas and blow them up.

All charges were dropped in October 2008 — after his lawyers sued for the disclosure of the 42 secret documents.

"I am so glad and so happy, more than words can express," Mohamed's sister, Zuhra Mohamed said Monday.

Two other former British residents remain in Guantanamo: Saudi-born Shaker Aamer, 37, and Algerian Ahmed Belbacha, 39.