BRITAIN’S ROLE in the secret abduction of terror suspects came under intense new scrutiny with the return to Britain of Binyam Mohamed yesterday after more than four years in Guantánamo Bay.
Senior MPs said they intended to pursue ministers and officials over what they knew of his ill-treatment and why Britain helped the CIA interrogate him.
In a statement released shortly after he arrived in a US Gulfstream jet at RAF Northolt in west London, Mr Mohamed said: “For myself, the very worst moment came when I realised in Morocco that the people who were torturing me were receiving questions and materials from British intelligence.”
Once inside the terminal building he met his sister for the fist time in more than seven years and in the most emotionally charged moment of the day they both cried and hugged.
Mr Mohamed was released after several hours of questioning by police and immigration officials and was last night being looked after by his legal team.
Clive Stafford Smith, his lawyer, spoke of a “fantastic day” after the long campaign to free his client, who spent weeks on hunger strike being force-fed at Guantánamo and looked “incredibly skinny and very emaciated”. Binyam was “extraordinarily grateful to be back in Britain”, said Mr Stafford Smith, who said he had “zero doubt” Britain was complicit in his client’s ill-treatment.
“Britain knew he was being abused and left him,” he said, referring to his secret abduction to Morocco where Mohamed says he was tortured. The lawyer also said his client was subjected to “very serious abuse” in Guantánamo.
Mr Stafford Smith said that while his family was not vindictive they wanted the truth to be known. Mr Mohamed hoped to be allowed to remain in the UK. “What we in Britain need to do is to make up for some of the things in the past and if the British government was, as I contend, deeply involved in the torture that Binyam had to go through, the least we can do is offer him his homeland,” he said.
Andrew Dismore, chairman of the Westminster parliament’s joint human rights committee, said he would lead a private meeting today to consider where their inquiry goes next.
Separately, Mike Gapes, chairman of the foreign affairs committee, said: “We will be pursuing the issue with ministers,” adding that his cross-party group had been trying to discover the UK’s role in the rendition of terror suspects for years. His committee intended to question David Miliband, the foreign secretary, and the foreign office minister Lord Malloch Brown.