“Biggest Crisis In 100 Years”: Britain’s Spy Agency May Be Paralyzed For Torturing Muslims Terrorists

Feb 20, 2010 4 Comments ›› Pat Dollard

Times Online:

AS befits Britain’s most senior spy, Jonathan Evans is noted in Whitehall for being cool under fire. That quality will be tested this week when MI5’s director-general learns whether his service is about to be engulfed by one of the biggest crises in its 100-year history.

For the past 10 weeks a senior lawyer in the office of Baroness Scotland, the attorney-general, has been studying the cases of five British men alleged to have been unlawfully detained and tortured in Pakistan with the complicity of MI5.

Scotland may rule there is insufficient evidence to call in detectives but if she does refer the cases to the police, it could in effect paralyse the agency that Evans has led since 2007.

Some observers think it might even threaten Evans’s position. He ran G branch, MI5’s international terrorism section, at the time of many of the torture claims.

Scotland has already shown that she takes seriously allegations of MI5 complicity in torture. Last year she called in detectives over two cases in which one of Evans’s subordinates, “Officer B”, and an unidentified MI6 officer are said to have colluded in the torture of Binyam Mohamed and one other British resident illegally detained in Pakistan in 2002. Last week it emerged that the Metropolitan police were examining a third case, that of Shaker Aamer, an inmate of Guantanamo Bay whose family lives in London.

The five cases on Scotland’s desk have yet to be subjected to independent scrutiny. But Ali Dayan Hasan, a researcher for Human Rights Watch, claims to have spoken to Pakistani officials who say they were “directly involved” in the torture of the Britons.

In each case, Hasan says he was given clear evidence that MI5 and MI6 officers knew about the torture but continued to take part — directly or indirectly — in interrogations.

The most compelling case is that of a 24-year-old medical student who was allegedly tortured for two months in a building opposite the British deputy high commission in Karachi. He was abducted at gunpoint by three Pakistani agents in August 2005 and says he was beaten, whipped, deprived of sleep and forced to witness the torture of other detainees. Known only as ZZ, he says he was questioned about alleged involvement in the July 7, 2005, attacks in London.

Towards the end of his detention, he says, he was questioned by two British intelligence officers. A retired official from Pakistan’s intelligence bureau told Hasan: “I do not know if the British knew that we had given him a good thrashing and ‘the treatment’. But they knew perfectly well we do not garland terrorism suspects.”

The student was released without charge and returned to the UK, where he practises medicine. He remains traumatised.

Four other cases being considered by the attorneygeneral may seem less clear-cut because, as with Mohamed, the suspects were formally accused of involvement in terrorism.

Zeeshan Siddiqui, from Hounslow, west London, was arrested as a terror suspect in Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province in May 2005. He says he was shackled, hooded, chained to the floor and force-fed a tranquilliser. He also claims he was threatened with sexual abuse.

Siddiqui claims he was interviewed on six occasions by British intelligence officers, including some from MI6. His lawyers say the interviews took place when Siddiqui was in a traumatised state.

He showed clear marks of violence and torture, which would have been visible to his British questioners, whom he alleges did nothing to intervene.

Siddiqui was later acquitted of the only charge he faced — using a forged identity card — and deported to the UK, where the authorities served a control order on him, placing him under house arrest without trial. He has since disappeared.

Pakistani intelligence officials are also said to have implicated MI5 agents in knowledge of the torture of Salahuddin Amin, from Edgware, north London, who was convicted in 2007 of the so-called fertiliser bomb plot.

During 10 months of illegal detention he was subjected to a variety of abuse. Amin was stripped naked and hung from the wall, threatened with rape with a wooden handle and told he would have a hole drilled into his backside.

He says that after being tortured, he was taken to a building where he was questioned on almost a dozen occasions by two British men called Matt and Richard, who had said they were from MI5.

Agents from MI5 were also involved in the case of Rangzieb Ahmed, from Rochdale, Lancashire. Convicted of directing terrorism in the UK in 2008, he claims to have been beaten with sticks, whipped with electric cables and deprived of sleep while held in Pakistan during August 2006.

The UK government has not denied that MI5 sent questions to be put to Ahmed and that its officers questioned him in Pakistani custody.

Lawyers and human rights lobbyists with knowledge of the five cases say they implicate more than the handful of MI5 agents involved in the interviews.

Clive Stafford Smith, Mohamed’s lawyer, says that under the United Nations convention against torture, senior government officials have a legal obligation to ensure all staff are aware of the treaty’s directives.

This was clearly not the case, he argues, given that in January 2002 an MI5 agent who expressed concerns at the treatment of detainees in Afghanistan by US agents was told by his supervisors in London that if prisoners were not in direct UK custody “the law does not require you to intervene”.

As Evans was then head of the MI5 division for counterterrorism, Stafford Smith argues that he is automatically implicated in its policy on torture. “If [Evans] did not issue the policy directive himself, then he had to be closely involved in its promulgation,” he said.