More
Stories From Guantánamo Bay
By Vikram Dodd
and Tania Branigan
04 August, 2004
The Guardian
Britain
and the US last night faced fresh allegations of abuses after a British
terror suspect said an SAS soldier had interrogated him for three hours
while an American colleague pointed a gun at him and threatened to shoot
him.
The allegation is contained in a new dossier detailing repeated beatings
and humiliation suffered by three Britons who were captured in Afghanistan,
then held in Guantánamo Bay for two years, before being released
in March without charge.
Rhuhel Ahmed, one
of the "Tipton Three", claims in the 115-page dossier that
shortly after his capture in November 2001 he was interviewed in Afghanistan
by a British interrogator who said he was from the SAS. Mr Ahmed alleges
he was taken by US guards to be interrogated by the British officer
in a tent. "One of the US soldiers had a gun to his head and he
was told if he moved they would shoot him," the report says. The
SAS officer pressed him to admit he had gone to Afghanistan to fight
a holy war. Last night the Ministry of Defence said it would investigate
the allegation.
A spokesman said:
"The British army follows the rules laid out in the Geneva convention
and soldiers are told to follow that. It is not permissible to point
guns at people's heads during interrogation. We would investigate if
any allegation of that nature is made."
The dossier, based
on two months of interviews by the men's lawyers, provides the first
full account by the three Britons of their ordeal as terror suspects.
Details of the experiences
of Shafiq Rasul, Asif Iqbal and Rhuhel Ahmed, all from the same small
Midlands town, are revealed today by the Guardian, and will be formally
released this afternoon in the US. The three Britons allege they were
repeatedly beaten, shackled in painful positions during interrogations
and subjected to sleep deprivation. On one occasion, Mr Iqbal recalled:
"I was left in a room and strobe lighting was put on and very loud
music. It was a dance version of Eminem played repeatedly."
Mr Rasul said he
was asked: "If I wanted to get surface-to-air missiles from someone
in Tipton, who would I go to?"
In an echo of the
abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib jail in Baghdad which shamed Washington,
the three Britons, held as illegal enemy combatants by the US, say they
were photographed naked and subjected to anal searches unnecessarily,
after being shackled for hours.
The three claim
their interrogators, from a phalanx of US intelligence agencies including
the CIA, accused them of being in a video shot in 2000 alongside Osama
bin Laden, the al-Qaida leader, and Mohamed Atta, the leader of the
September 11 attack. At the time one of the three was working in a Currys
electrical store in the Midlands and two others were in trouble with
the British police. Despite this, all three say the pain they were in
and ill treatment led them confess to being in the video.
The dossier also
alleges complicity by Britain in their treatment. The three challenge
a claim by the Foreign Office junior minister, Chris Mullin, who in
the Commons said no Briton had complained of their treatment in Guantánamo.
Mr Iqbal says a British embassy official took down a two-page list of
alleged abuses, while the two others say they made their complaints
orally. Mr Rasul says he was interrogated by British personnel up to
seven times, with MI5 officers questioning the Britons repeatedly.
On June 4 last year
Tony Blair told the Commons: "Information is still coming from
people detained there ... that information is important."
In the dossier the
Britons say the level of mental illness among detainees is higher than
admitted by the US. The Tipton Three say guards told them that a fellow
British detainee, Moazzam Begg, still imprisoned in Guantánamo,
had been kept in isolation and "was in a very bad way". They
say that Jamil el-Banna, of London, was so traumatised that "mentally,
basically, he's finished".
Mr Banna is a Jordanian
citizen with refugee status in Britain, but the government refuses to
represent him. It also refuses to represent another Londoner, Bisher
al-Rawi, originally from Iraq, who lived in Kingston, south-west London.
Lawyer Gareth Peirce
said the report showed Britain's complicity in the human rights abuses
at Guantánamo: "The [British government] attitude displayed
the hypocrisy of the public face in the UK saying we're doing all we
can and the private face there in Guantánamo involved up to their
elbows in the oppression."
Nine Britons were
imprisoned in Guantánamo without charge or access to a lawyer.
The Tipton Three were among five released in March, who were questioned
on arrival in Britain before being released. Four Britons remain in
Guantánamo, as well as four British residents.