Anti-terrorist police quizzed four British Muslims on Wednesday, a day after their release from United States custody at Guantanamo Bay, as a fifth savoured freedom for the first time in two years.
All five men returned to Britain on Tuesday on a Royal Air Force (RAF) flight from the naval base in Cuba where the US holds about 650 alleged al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters — suspects in its post-September 11 ”war on terror”.
Negotiations between London and Washington are continuing on the fate of four other Britons at Guantanamo Bay who are likely to face trial before controversial US military courts.
As expected, four of the men who returned on Tuesday — Ruhal Ahmed (22), Asif Iqbal (22), Shafiq Rasul (26) and Tarek Dergoul (26) — were arrested by police upon arrival at an RAF base outside London.
They were taken to a high-security police station in west London to be questioned under the Terrorism Act 2000, which allows detectives to hold them without charge for a maximum 14 days.
But a fifth, Jamal al Harith (37), was only detained for four hours under immigration rules before he was given a police escort through a crush of reporters to rejoin his family from Manchester.
His lawyer, Robert Lizar, said the Jamaican-born Al Harith, a web designer and convert to Islam, wanted the US authorities to ”answer for the injustice which he has suffered” at Guantanamo Bay.
”He has been detained as an innocent for a period of two years. He has been treated in a cruel, inhumane and degrading manner, he wants the authorities to answer for that,” Lizar said.
”He’s an innocent man,” the lawyer added. ”He wants to know why he was kept in custody for so long.”
Plans to free the five from Guantanamo Bay were announced in February by the British government after months of behind-the-scenes negotiations with the US administration.
The Pentagon said on Tuesday that they were being released because Washington believed they no longer posed a threat to US national security.
Asked why it took two years to come to that conclusion, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said: ”The goal was to keep these people off a battlefield and to keep them away from killing other people.”
”That’s a good thing,” he added. ”That’s not a bad thing.”
Guantanamo Bay, a US naval base on the eastern end of Cuba, was converted into a detention camp for ”enemy combatants” captured by US forces in Afghanistan after the September 11 attacks in New York and Washington in 2001.
Human rights groups say Guantanamo Bay, and the ”military commissions” that the Pentagon is setting up to try to sentence its detainees, are a travesty of justice and due process.
The four Britons who remain in Guantanamo Bay are Feroz Abbasi, Moazzam Begg, Richard Belmar and Martin Mubanga, who also holds Zambian citizenship.
US officials, quoted on Monday in the Daily Telegraph newspaper, alleged that the four were trained terrorists who would rejoin Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda network if they were released.
Abbasi (23), who came to Britain from Uganda as a child, and Begg (36), a former Birmingham bookseller, have been designated by US President George Bush to be among the first to stand trial before US military courts.
Rumsfeld said on Tuesday that, out of a total of 105 detainees transferred out of Guantanamo Bay since it became a detention camp, one is known to have gone back to being what he called a ”terrorist”. — Sapa-AFP