British police have freed all five Britons flown home from Guantanamo Bay prison camp -- and the former terror suspects began denouncing their US captors yesterday amid questions about why they were held for two years.
The US turned over the five detainees to British custody on Tuesday, and by late Wednesday British police and prosecutors decided to release all of them without charges.
This could cause trouble for British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who will face public dismay as to why it took so long for Washington's closest ally to win its citizens' freedom if authorities at home concluded they should not face trial.
PHOTO: AFP
One of the five freed men was released on Tuesday and the other four on Wednesday, while a further four Britons remain at the Guantanamo prison in Cuba. Washington says they are more dangerous than the five it decided to send home.
Greg Powell, lawyer for one of the freed men, said 21-year-old Rhuhel Ahmed was on his way to a reunion with his family early yesterday after being released just before midnight. He was one of three prisoners from Tipton, a small industrial town in central England.
"He's on his way to meet his family and obviously that's a tremendous moment for all of them, because they haven't seen each other since 2001," Powell said.
Powell said he had met his client at the London jail where he was released and found him in good health. But his treatment at the hands of the Americans had amounted to "torture."
"What I have learned from him is Guantanamo Bay is a kind of experiment in interrogation techniques and methods, really. And they do have extremely interesting stories to tell about what went on there," Powell said.
He declined to give further details about the prisoners' treatment, or explain what his client was doing in Afghanistan when he was arrested.
Powell said Ahmed's family wanted privacy. But the former prisoners will be at the center of a media frenzy -- which could prove a money-spinner if they opt to sell their stories.
None of the five appeared in public immediately.
Britain's most famous publicist, Max Clifford, whose client list ranges from top nobility to O.J. Simpson, said he had been hired by the family of former detainee Terek Dergoul, 24, and expected tabloids would bid six figures for prisoners' stories.
Jamal al Harith, 35, from the northern city of Manchester, was the first to go free shortly after the group landed at a British air base on Tuesday.
Dergoul, a Londoner, was freed on Wednesday, followed by the Tipton detainees, including Ahmed and his friends Asif Iqbal, 20, and Shafiq Rasul, 24. Their families said they had traveled to Pakistan in late 2001 to find one of them a wife.
A fourth youth from Tipton, Monir Ali, had traveled with them and disappeared. His family has hoped the others will provide clues to his fate.
While Blair's supporters see the prisoners' return as a peace dividend for his support of US President George W. Bush, the Guantanamo issue could remain a major political headache.
Britons will want to know why it took more than two years to get them out. Meanwhile, the fate of the four still in Guantanamo will stay high on the political agenda.
Britain says the Bush administration's plans for special military tribunals to try Guantanamo suspects do not measure up to basic fairness standards. It wants either the rules to be modified or the suspects sent back to Britain for trial.
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
Asian perspectives of the US have shifted from a country once perceived as a force of “moral legitimacy” to something akin to “a landlord seeking rent,” Singaporean Minister for Defence Ng Eng Hen (黃永宏) said on the sidelines of an international security meeting. Ng said in a round-table discussion at the Munich Security Conference in Germany that assumptions undertaken in the years after the end of World War II have fundamentally changed. One example is that from the time of former US president John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address more than 60 years ago, the image of the US was of a country
BLIND COST CUTTING: A DOGE push to lay off 2,000 energy department workers resulted in hundreds of staff at a nuclear security agency being fired — then ‘unfired’ US President Donald Trump’s administration has halted the firings of hundreds of federal employees who were tasked with working on the nation’s nuclear weapons programs, in an about-face that has left workers confused and experts cautioning that the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE’s) blind cost cutting would put communities at risk. Three US officials who spoke to The Associated Press said up to 350 employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) were abruptly laid off late on Thursday, with some losing access to e-mail before they’d learned they were fired, only to try to enter their offices on Friday morning
CONFIDENT ON DEAL: ‘Ukraine wants a seat at the table, but wouldn’t the people of Ukraine have a say? It’s been a long time since an election, the US president said US President Donald Trump on Tuesday criticized Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and added that he was more confident of a deal to end the war after US-Russia talks. Trump increased pressure on Zelenskiy to hold elections and chided him for complaining about being frozen out of talks in Saudi Arabia. The US president also suggested that he could meet Russian President Vladimir Putin before the end of the month as Washington overhauls its stance toward Russia. “I’m very disappointed, I hear that they’re upset about not having a seat,” Trump told reporters at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida when asked about the Ukrainian
RSS