Friday, February 25, 2005


I saw Americans kill terror suspects, says Guantanamo Briton
One of the four Britons released from Guantanamo Bay last month said he was tortured by the Americans at a separate holding camp and spent many hours trussed like an animal with a bag over his head.

Moazzam Begg, 37, who was released by the Metropolitan Police without charge and reunited with his wife and four children after three years' imprisonment, also accuses his American captors of beating two detainees to death at the Bagram air base near Kabul in Afghanistan. In his first interview since his release, he told Channel 4 News he "witnessed two people get beaten so badly I believe it caused their deaths".

In February 2003, Mr Begg was transferred from Bagram to Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. The former law student and bookshop owner from Birmingham joined hundreds of other "unlawful combatants", shackled and dressed in orange jumpsuits, then held without charge, trial or access to lawyers. For much of his detention he was in solitary confinement, often exposed to extreme weather and deprived of basic necessities. Last night he said he was interviewed at Guantanomo by US security officers who asked him to identify the guards in the alleged beatings.

He told Channel 4: "I saw one body actually being carried away and the other one, I wasn't sure whether he had been killed but the photographs the American intelligence officers had brought confirmed this person had been killed."...