Ex-Guantanamo prisoner became suicide bomber
BRITAIN: When he returned to Manchester from Guantanamo Bay, Jamal al-Harith was hailed as an innocent man who had simply found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time. He was paid £1 million by a government desperate to keep under wraps his allegations of British complicity in his interrogation and claims of torture and humiliation.
The British Muslim convert’s death in Iraq as an Islamic State militant has cast a long shadow over his fight for justice. He ploughed a ramshackle armoured 4x4 laden with explosives into a militia base near Mosul, in northern Iraq, on Tuesday.
The treatment he had suffered meant that Harith, born Ronald Fiddler to orthodox Christian parents from Jamaica, was barely questioned by British officials when he arrived home from Camp X-Ray in March 2004.
He had been shipped to Guantanamo without an allegation against him, and told that he would be processed and released. The former website designer was held without charge for two years, during which time he said he was beaten, forced to take injections of unknown substances and held in solitary confinement.
However, intelligence that appears in his Guantanamo file alleges that he was ‘‘a high threat to the US, its interests and allies’’. It details his links to a ‘‘wellknown al Qaeda operative’’, and alleges that he made up the name of the school where he said he spent five years teaching in Sudan from 1992, which coincided with Osama bin Laden’s time there.
Harith had been backpacking in Pakistan weeks after the 9/11 attacks, and was at the border with Afghanistan as the US invasion of that country began.
Then 34, Harith said he had paid a local truck driver to take him to Turkey via Afghanistan, and that was how he found himself in a Taliban jail in Kandahar, accused of being a British spy.
His brother, Leon Jameson, said yesterday that Harith had ‘‘wasted his life’’.
Known as Ronnie, Harith had been a keen football, basketball and table tennis player and had won a trophy for karate as a teenager, his brother said. He converted after making Muslim friends at Wythenshawe College, where he took computing and religious studies.
‘‘All I know is one day he brought a Quran home,’’ Jameson added. ‘‘We were supportive of it, yeah, we didn’t see anything wrong with it at the time, and the trouble only started later, seems like he’s been dragged into it.’’
He swiftly became more serious about his religion, and travelled first to Pakistan and then to Khartoum in Sudan, where he claimed to have spent five years studying Arabic and teaching English.
In Afghanistan, Harith was captured by the Taliban and held as a suspected British spy until Northern Alliance soldiers assumed control of the prison where he and four others were being held.
He was transferred for interrogation at an American air base and on to Guantanamo, in the belief that he would provide intelligence on Taliban interrogation techniques.
After his release, he told the Mirror: ’’When I was interrogated, the Americans used to say, ‘How come you’re so clean? We’ve put your name and face through Interpol and we can’t even find a speeding ticket’. I told them, ’That’s because I’ve never done anything wrong in my life. You don’t have anything on me’.
‘‘I think that’s why they were so hard on me. They couldn’t bear to admit they had made a mistake.’’
Robert Lizar, the lawyer who aided Harith’s return to Britain, urged caution about concluding that the client who died a terrorist had always been a terrorist.
‘‘He was subject to cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment. My feeling was that he actually was nothing to do with these repellent organisations he ended up with.’’ - The Times