Detainee’s allegations investigated
LONDON - Police said yesterday that they have launched a criminal investigation to determine if British intelligence officers were aware of the treatment of a former Guantanamo Bay detainee who says he was tortured while being detained in Guantanamo, Pakistan, and Morocco.
Binyam Mohamed, an Ethiopian who moved to Britain as a teenager, was arrested as a suspected terrorist in 2002 in Karachi, Pakistan, and alleges that during three months of detention he was tortured by Pakistani agents and interrogated by the FBI and MI5, Britain’s domestic security agency.
Mohamed asserts that he was then taken to Morocco as part of the CIA’s “extraordinary rendition’’ program and that his torturers there were being fed questions and material by British intelligence agents.
From there, Mohamed says, he was transferred to the Guantanamo Bay detention center in Cuba in 2004 and beaten there. He was released from Guantanamo without being charged in February.
British officials have not investigated Mohamed’s allegations about his treatment outside the UK, but in March, British Attorney General Patricia Scotland said she had asked London’s police force to consider Mohamed’s allegation that MI5 officers were aware he had been tortured.
London’s Metropolitan Police force said yesterday that it has launched a criminal investigation led by Assistant Commissioner Sue Akers. 