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We welcome Binyam’s return to Britain after enduring nearly seven years of illegal imprisonment and facing terrible torture. His ordeal has been such that we are thankful that he has returned alive. We hope that he is offered appropriate treatment and that he will regain his health.
We thank the Foreign & Commonweath Office for facilitating his return and hope that they will ensure that Binyam receives the support that he needs. We also emphasise that other British residents, such as Ahmed Belbacha from Bournmouth, and Shaker Aamer from London are still detained in Guantanamo and they need to be returned to the UK immediately. Binyam, a British resident, was seized in Pakistan in April 2002, and then rendered to Morocco by the CIA where he was kept for 18 months and severely tortured. He was flown back to Afghanistan in January 2004 where he was further tortured at a US facility known as the ‘Dark Prison’ and in May he was known to be in the US prison at Bagram airbase. As a result of this two-year ordeal he made two ‘confessions’. He was transferred to Guantanamo Bay in September 2004. Three sets of charges against him have all been dropped. His lawyer claimed, in 2005, that all that a trial by military commission would produce would be evidence not of terrorism but of torture. The third set of charges were dropped in October last year after the prosecutor resigned in protest.
Last July Binyam’s lawyers filed a petition in a UK court declaring that the Foreign Office should be compelled to turn over evidence of his abuse. In August the High Court concluded that the British security services has facilitated the original interrogation of Binyam Mohamed in Pakistan. Recently the High Court refused to order the disclosure of a CIA dossier said to contain evidence of Binyam’s abuse, apparently because of a ‘threat’ that the US would not share security intelligence with the UK if the documents were released. David Miliband subsequently denied the US threat. But, the fact remains that what happened to Binyam Mohamed between 2002 and 2004 remains secret amid credible charges of torture, abuse, forced confessions and illegal rendition, and the UK government is complicit if not also actively involved in these illegal acts.
We demand that this information be released and that a full investigation of possible criminal acts follow. The shame of Guantanamo, dubbed by Amnesty International as the ‘gulag of our times’ will remain for ever of there is no justice for those who have been illegally imprisoned and abused.
For further information contact Naeem Malik 07721 427690
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Birmingham Campaign 
