A former Guantanamo Bay prisoner has accused British intelligence of feeding questions to the CIA that he says were put to him while he was tortured in Pakistani and Moroccan jails.
The allegations by Binyam Mohamed, a British resident, looked set to fuel demands for a full investigation into whether Britain’s support for the US “war on terror” amounted in his case to complicity with torture.
“When I realized that the British were cooperating with the people torturing me, I felt completely naked,” Mohamed told the Mail on Sunday newspaper in his first interview since being freed from the Guantanamo prison camp on Cuba last month.
A spokesman for Britain’s Foreign Office said: “We abhor torture and never order it or condone it. We take allegations of mistreatment seriously and investigate them when they are made.”
Speaking to the Mail on Sunday, Mohamed disclosed that he his mind remains fragile and he feels “emotionally dead.”
Mohamed, an Ethiopian citizen, said he and his lawyers, in the course of legal action in the US, had seen copies of telegrams from Britain’s MI5 intelligence service to the CIA.
He said an MI5 memo sent while he was held in Pakistan in 2002 offered to provide useful background information that would help interrogators identify inconsistencies in his answers.
“This will place the detainee under more direct pressure and would seem to be the most effective way of obtaining intelligence on Mohammed’s [sic] activities/plans concerning the UK,” the alleged memo said.
Mohamed quoted telegrams he said were sent by MI5 to the CIA while he was held between 2002 and 2004 in Morocco, where he says he endured torture including scalpel cuts to his penis.
One of them, headed “Request for further Detainee questioning,” included a list of written questions about another individual, whether Mohamed knew him, where he met him, where he had gone and what his intentions were.
Mohamed said he remembered clearly the moment when MI5’s questions were first relayed by his Moroccan interrogators.
“They started bringing British files to the interrogations — thick binders, some of them containing sheaves of photos of people who lived in London and places there like mosques,” he said. “It was when they started asking the questions supplied by the British that my situation worsened. They sold me out.”
US authorities at one point accused Mohamed of conspiring to detonate a “dirty bomb” in the US, but eventually freed him from Guantanamo without charge.
The British government defended its decision not to release classified information supplied to it by the US on Mohamed’s case, saying it would jeopardize intelligence cooperation with Washington.
Britain’s attorney-general has said she will see if there is sufficient evidence to order an investigation into the actions of the British government and its intelligence officers.
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
TRUMP EFFECT: The win capped one of the most dramatic turnarounds in Canadian political history after the Conservatives had led the Liberals by more than 20 points Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney yesterday pledged to win US President Donald Trump’s trade war after winning Canada’s election and leading his Liberal Party to another term in power. Following a campaign dominated by Trump’s tariffs and annexation threats, Carney promised to chart “a new path forward” in a world “fundamentally changed” by a US that is newly hostile to free trade. “We are over the shock of the American betrayal, but we should never forget the lessons,” said Carney, who led the central banks of Canada and the UK before entering politics earlier this year. “We will win this trade war and
Armed with 4,000 eggs and a truckload of sugar and cream, French pastry chefs on Wednesday completed a 121.8m-long strawberry cake that they have claimed is the world’s longest ever made. Youssef El Gatou brought together 20 chefs to make the 1.2 tonne masterpiece that took a week to complete and was set out on tables in an ice rink in the Paris suburb town of Argenteuil for residents to inspect. The effort overtook a 100.48m-long strawberry cake made in the Italian town of San Mauro Torinese in 2019. El Gatou’s cake also used 350kg of strawberries, 150kg of sugar and 415kg of
RSS