Guatanamo Bay : Probe into MI5’s role in “torture”

By Hasan Suroor

Source : "The Hindu"

LONDON: The British government has ordered an investigation into MI5’s role in the alleged torture of a British resident being held at Guantanamo Bay to extract confession from him.

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith is reported to have asked Attorney-General Baroness Scotland to investigate allegations that an MI5 officer took part in unlawful interrogation of Binyam Mohamed (30), when he was arrested in Pakistan in 2002 on terror charges.

This follows a High Court judgment which held that MI5 actively colluded with U.S. authorities in their use of illegal methods to obtain a confession from him.

The court ruled in favour of Mr. Mohamed’s demand that the information held by the British government should be made available to his lawyers to help them prove that his confession was obtained under torture. It asked the Foreign and Commonwealth Office to reconsider its refusal to divulge the information on grounds of national security.

Ethiopia-born Mr. Mohammed claims after being arrested in Pakistan in 2002, Americans flew him to Morocco where he was beaten, deprived of sleep and his genitals were cut with a scalpel. He says U.S. interrogators in Pakistan told him: “We can’t do what we want here; the Pakistanis can’t do exactly what we want them to do. The Arabs will deal with you.”

The U.S. alleges that Mr. Mohamed, who worked in Britain, travelled to Afghanistan in May 2001 and accepted instructions from Al-Qaeda leader Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to conduct terror operations in the U.S.