UK 'colluded in terror flights'

BBC
Jun. 07, 2006

The UK has helped the US fly terror suspects to secret detention camps, says a report from Europe's leading human rights watchdog.

A report for the Council of Europe by Swiss MP Dick Marty says Prestwick Airport in Scotland was a stop-off point for the CIA flights.

And it says British intelligence gave information used to mistreat a former UK resident held in Guantanamo Bay.

The UK denies the flight claims. No 10 says the report "contains nothing new".

Tony Blair's official spokesman said: "We are not going to give publicity to a report that says nothing."

Web of flights

The report concludes that a "spider's web" of flights criss-crossed Europe, and included secret jails in Poland and Romania.

Both countries had previously denied the claims and Mr Marty admits there is "no formal evidence" of secret detention centres.

But he says it is clear an unspecified number of people were unlawfully arrested and/or detained and transported by services acting for the US.

It says 14 European countries colluded with the CIA over the secret prisoner flights.

Mr Marty says the UK was among seven countries which "could be held responsible, in varying degrees, which are not always settled definitively, for violations of the rights of specific individuals".

He specifically criticises the UK for helping in the detention and mistreatment of Binyam Mohamed al Habashi, an Ethiopian citizen who was a UK resident from 1994 onwards.

He is being held at Guantanamo Bay and is due to appear before a military tribunal.

Intelligence claims

Mr Marty points to claims that Mr al Habashi, who says he was arrested in Pakistan after visiting Afghanistan, was tortured in Morocco to try to get him to confess to terrorist activities.

His interrogators, one of whom the report says is thought to have been a CIA agent, used personal information about him to suggest they knew a lot about it, he says.

"Much of the personal information - including details of his education, his friendships in London and even his kickboxing trainer - could only have originated from collusion in this interrogation process by UK intelligence services," says his report.

"Since the purposes to which this information would be put were reasonably foreseeable, the provision of this information by the British Government amounts to complicity in Binyam's detention and ill-treatment."

The report also slams MI5 for cooperating with the CIA in "abducting persons against which there is no evidence enabling them to be kept in prison lawfully".

It cites the case of Bisher Al-Rawi and Jamil El-Banna, two UK residents who were arrested in Gambia and later transferred to Afghanistan and then Guantanamo Bay.

'Almost as bad as terrorists'

The UK Government has said the US has made no requests to transfer prisoners through British territory and airspace since George Bush became president.

But Lib Dem foreign affairs spokesman Michael Moore said: "This report exposes the myth that European governments had no knowledge of or involvement in rendition and secret detentions.

"Ministers must answer specific allegations of British assistance, and explain why they have failed to ask hard questions of their Americans counterparts."

Former Foreign Office Minister Tony Lloyd said attempts to fight terrorism could be damaged if the report's findings were borne out.

"It leads to a suspicion that at very best we are using the wrong tactics or even that what we are doing is almost of itself as bad as the terrorists," he told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.

Mike Gapes, chairman of the Commons foreign affairs select committee, said the report included information from flight logs about alleged CIA planes.

But those logs did not show who was on the planes or whether they were being used for rendition, he argued.

"There doesn't seem to be anything really new," said Mr Gapes. "It's very much what has already been flagged up in the last few months."