Guantanamo detainee claims MI5 misinformation led to arrest and torture

ANDREW O SELSKY

JAMIL el-Banna has been locked up by the United States for nearly five years without being charged - arrested in Africa, allegedly tortured at a CIA “black site” in Afghanistan, then held at Guantanamo Bay - all because of faulty British intelligence, his lawyers claimed yesterday.

Now, the UK government has said that el-Banna had been cleared by the US for transfer to his native Jordan, where he says he was tortured before becoming a political refugee in Britain in 1997. His lawyers have decried the move, saying that sending him back amounted to the US outsourcing torture.

“We are going to block his rendition to Jordan,” lawyer Clive Stafford Smith said. “To be sure, he would be out of [Guantanamo], but it would be from the frying pan into the fire.”

Navy Cmdr Jeffrey Gordon, a Pentagon spokesman, refused to discuss el-Banna, who is under indictment in Spain for allegedly joining a terrorist group and who admits associating with Islamic extremists but denies having anything to do with al-Qaeda or any other terror activity.

Tony Blair recently told Parliament that he opposes el-Banna’s return to Britain, where the detainee’s wife and five British-citizen children live and where - according to his supporters - official mishandling of intelligence information led to his arrest in the first place.

According to intelligence documents, el-Banna’s troubles started after a British MI5 intelligence officer visited his home near London in October 2002 and tried to get him to become a paid informant.

He had associations with radical Muslims, including Abu Qatada, a Muslim cleric described by a Spanish judge as Osama bin Laden’s “spiritual ambassador in Europe”.

Also, in Jordan, el-Banna belonged to a radical Palestinian support group linked to Iran and Syria - which is what got him in trouble with Jordanian authorities.

The MI5 officer wrote that el-Banna “did not give any hint of willingness to cooperate with us”.

Unbeknown to el-Banna, his friend Bisher al-Rawi, an Iraqi living in Britain, was helping MI5 keep tabs on London’s Muslim community.

At the time, Abu Qatada was in hiding to avoid arrest under Britain’s anti-terrorism laws, and al-Rawi relayed messages between MI5 and the cleric.

Al-Rawi also recruited el-Banna on the trip that ended with their arrest in Africa.

They were detained at Gatwick Airport. According to an MI5 memo written on November 1 2002, “some form of homemade electronic device” found in al-Rawi’s bag could have been used in a car bomb.

British authorities released the men three days later and let them go to Africa after deciding the device was simply “a commercially available battery charger that had been modified by al-Rawi in order to make it more powerful”.

They were eventually handed over to CIA custody, where according to a lawsuit filed on April 26, they were tortured.

The men were taken to Afghanistan and several months later the two were moved to Guantanamo.

The Home Office, which oversees MI5, refused to comment.

©2007 Scotsman.com

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