Binyam Mohamed spent his first full day back in the UK yesterday after four years in Guantánamo Bay. His lawyers said he went on a two-hour country walk, enjoying being in the open air without shackles.
The Ethiopian-born UK resident, who says he was brutally tortured while being detained as a terror suspect by the US, spent most of the rest of the day talking to his family, to his sister, Zuhra, who has flown to the UK from the US, and to his brother, Benhur, on the telephone.
His sister said he was coming to terms with his captivity. “He’s happy and he’s glad to be out. It hasn’t sunk in yet that he’s really here,” she told the BBC.
Mohamed does not yet want to meet the media or be photographed, his lawyer Clive Stafford Smith said.
In Westminster on Tuesday there was fierce debate following Mohamed’s return to the UK on a US Gulfstream jet, and the evidence of British involvement in his secret detention and interrogation in Pakistan, Morocco, and Afghanistan, before he was flown to the US camp in Cuba in 2004.
David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, told MPs that he had no objection to the release of US intelligence documents relating to Mohamed’s treatment. And he referred to a recent decision by Eric Holder, the new US attorney general, to review all claims asserting state secrecy in the US courts. However, Stafford Smith described Miliband’s statement as a “red herring”. Holder “cannot determine what is said by UK courts”, the lawyer said.
Two judges in the English high court this month made it clear they would have ordered the disclosure of the US documents had not Miliband warned them that UK national security would be at risk. This, the court said, was because the US had threatened to stop sharing intelligence with Britain.
Miliband told MPs on Tuesday: “There is nothing in the contents of the documents that causes us to say they should be kept secret.” His shadow, William Hague, pressed the foreign secretary to request the release of the information. “I am simply asking you to go one step further and suggest to the United States that that is what should be done,” Hague said.
The former shadow home secretary David Davis asked whether ministers had given permission for British intelligence to be used by agents when Mohamed was held in Morocco. Miliband replied: “Those are precisely the matters being addressed by the attorney general [Lady Scotland] at the moment and I think it’s right that we wait for her inquiry into whether or not there has been criminal wrongdoing to be concluded.” – guardian.co.uk