A JUDICIAL inquiry was demanded last night after former Guantánamo Bay detainee Binyam Mohamed claimed he would not have faced rendition and torture if it was not for the involvement of MI5.
In his first broadcast interview, Mr Mohamed, a UK resident who was released last month after seven years in captivity, repeated his claim that MI5 officers helped US agents to interrogate him following his arrest in Pakistan in 2002.
He told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme he believed it was their involvement that led to him being transferred to Morocco where he says he was tortured.
“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.” Mr Mohamed, an Ethiopian national, said that during his detention in Pakistan – where he was arrested for travelling on a false passport – he was questioned by an MI5 officer who called himself John.
Following his removal by the Americans to a secret site in Morocco he said he was interrogated by local officers who asked him questions supplied by British intelligence, showing hundreds of photographs of Muslim men living in the UK.
“I was shocked because there I was in Pakistan talking to John on how he is going to help me and I find out that the way he is going to help me is by forcing the Americans to question me on things I had no idea about,” he said.
The British government has consistently said that it does not solicit or condone the use of torture. Home secretary Jacqui Smith referred Mr Mohamed’s claims to the attorney general, Baroness Scotland of Asthal, when they first surfaced last year.–(PA)