Briton tells of his four-year ‘nightmare’ at Guantanamo

Sean O’Neill
The Times
Apr. 02, 2007

A former Guantanamo Bay detainee spoke yesterday of the sense of hopelessness he felt during his 4½year incarceration at the internment camp.

“My nightmare is finally at an end,” said Bisher al-Rawi, 39, after returning to his family’s home in New Malden, southwest London.

Mr al-Rawi was briefly detained for a security check at Luton airport on Friday night. But unlike other Britons who have been freed from the camp, at a US naval base on Cuba, he was neither arrested nor questioned by police about terrorist activity. Mr al-Rawi was detained in The Gambia in 2002 while on a business trip and flown to Afghanistan and then Guantanamo by the CIA. He said he had endured a “horrific experience”.

He said: “The hopelessness you feel can hardly be described. You are asked the same questions hundreds of times. Allegations are made against you that are laughably untrue but you have no chance to prove them wrong.

“There is no trial, no fair legal process. I was alleged to have participated in terrorist training in Bosnia and Afghanistan. I’ve never been to Bosnia and the only time I visited Afghanistan was thanks to the hospitality of the CIA in an underground prison – the Dark Prison – outside Kabul.”

Mr al-Rawi told his interrogators that he had been an intermediary between MI5 and the extremist Islamic cleric Abu Qatada. Mr al-Rawi came to Britain as a child when his family fled Iraq to escape persecution. While his family took British citizenship, he remained an Iraqi in the hope of reclaiming family property in Iraq.

He was classified as a British resident, not a citizen, so the Government initially said that it could not negotiate for his release. That changed and Mr al-Rawi, a former pupil of Millfield School, in Somerset, thanked diplomats for their efforts in securing his freedom.

Zachary Katznelson, of the campaign group Reprieve, said: “Bisher has been through almost unimaginable difficulties . . . kept in an underground prison, beaten, subjected to temperature extremes and to extended isolation.”

Detained

The campaign group Reprieve claims that nine people with the right to live in Britain are still held in Guantanamo Bay:

Shaker Aamer, 39, Saudi

Jamil El Banna, 44, Jordanian

Saiid Farhi, Algerian

Mohammed al-Qadir, Algerian

Binyam Mohammed, 28, Ethiopian

Ahmed Belbacha, Algerian

Ahmed Errachidi, 40, Moroccan

Abdennour Sameur, 33, Algerian

Omar Deghayes, 36, Libyan