A Guantanamo Bay inmate who claims he was tortured while in US custody was scheduled to be released yesterday and returned to Britain, his lawyer said.
Binyam Mohamed, an Ethiopian citizen and former British resident, has been kept at the military prison camp in Cuba even though terrorism charges against him were dropped last October.
His release had been widely anticipated after US President Barack Obama took office pledging to close Guantanamo and return as many detainees as possible to their home countries. British Foreign Secretary David Miliband has been lobbying for Mohamed’s return to Britain since 2007.
Human rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith said on Sunday he was “confident it will happen on Monday.”
Stafford Smith acts as Mohamed’s civilian lawyer. Military lawyer Lieutenant Colonel Yvonne Bradley said she had no confirmation of when her client was due to return to Britain. She said she was often the last person to know what the US government was doing with Mohamed.
“You’d think counsel would know, but this is what I’ve been dealing with for the last three years,” Bradley said.
Mohamed, 30, who moved to Britain as a refugee when he was 15, was arrested in Pakistan on a visa violation and turned over to US authorities, said rights group Reprieve, which Stafford Smith directs.
Mohamed alleges he was beaten in Pakistan and tortured in Morocco and Afghanistan before being moved to the US facility in Cuba in September 2004. Washington has never publicly acknowledged extraordinary renditions to places such as Morocco and still refuses to say where Mohamed was before he was taken to Guantanamo.
Although Britain’s Foreign Office released a statement on Friday saying Mohamed would be returned to the UK “as soon as the practical arrangements can be made” it has repeatedly declined to say exactly when he is expected back.
Stafford Smith said he did not know the details of Mohamed’s release. He could not say when exactly Mohamed would arrive or where in Britain Mohamed would be taken, although he noted that other Guantanamo inmates had been flown into London’s Luton Airport or the Brize Norton Royal Air Force base near Oxford.
‘CROSSING THE LINE’: China’s embassy in Seoul criticized US Forces Korea Commander General Xavier Brunson, asking if his ‘hostile’ remarks were authorized by Washington South Korea and the US are in talks over recent public remarks by the commander of US Forces Korea, Seoul’s presidential office said yesterday, after the comments drew sharp criticism from China. In a recent podcast interview, US Forces Korea Commander General Xavier Brunson described South Korea as “the dagger in the heart of Asia” from China’s east coast, prompting the Chinese embassy in Seoul to say that he had “truly crossed the line.” The interview came amid growing speculation that Washington might seek to expand the role of US Forces Korea in countering the growing regional influence of China, a key
Through the noise of rushing papers and whirring belts at a print factory in Kyoto, two creators watch their photo essay come to life in broadsheet form — part of an effort to win new audiences in the age of artificial intelligence (AI). Despite the decline of the publishing industry, self-publication and handmade “zine” magazines are growing in popularity in Japan, reflecting the nation’s enduring love of paper in the digital era. While speaking to Agence France-Presse at the plant, his hands black with ink, one of the creators, Kazuma Obara, said: “I think [paper] is a medium that engages all five
Australian researchers have trained lab-grown brain cells on a silicon computer chip to play the 1990s shooter game Doom and said they are just scratching the surface of what the neurons could be capable of doing. It is the science-fiction work of biotech boffins at Cortical Labs, who researched and developed the technology that harnesses the workings of the brain’s networking system. Each so-called “biological computer” contains about 200,000 living human brain cells, grown from stem cells that were harvested from blood donations. Having mastered the simple computer game Pong, where a paddle is moved up and down to send a ball
France experienced its hottest spring on record, the French weather service said on Tuesday, after an exceptional early heat wave that also broke highs for the season in England and Wales. Meteo-France said the average nationwide temperature over March to May was 13.8°C — about 1.7°C above the norm, and surpassing records set in 2011 and 2020. “The warmest spring since records began in 1900,” it said in a bulletin. All three months were warmer than average, but the onset of an “unprecedented heatwave” late last month pushed the mercury to highs typically seen at the height of the summer. “Our country had never
RSS