Who DID sign off ‘£1m payment’ to this bomber?
TERRORIST AND HOUSE HE BOUGHT WITH OUR CASH
A FURIOUS political blame game erupted last night over the alleged £1million paid to a British Guantanamo Bay detainee unmasked as an IS suicide bomber.
Ronald Fiddler was handed taxpayerfunded compensation after claiming MI6 agents were complicit in his mistreatment by the Americans.
Despite lobbying by Tony Blair’s government for his release, the former web designer from Manchester this week carried out a suicide bombing in Iraq.
Fiddler’s family last night issued a statement saying he had not received as much as £1million. But former terror laws watchdog Lord Carlile declared that he was an ‘enemy of the state’ and ‘plainly a terrorist’ who should never have been given a penny.
One MP told Theresa May that there was something ‘profoundly wrong’ with the justice system when a terror suspect could pocket public cash while British veterans faced prosecution over service in Northern Ireland 40 years later.
Mr Blair – who was PM when Fiddler was released – pointed the finger at the Conservatives for agreeing the compensation sum in 2010, when Mrs May was Home Secretary. Others however, said the payout had been set in train by Labour before it lost power. Downing Street, meanwhile, flatly refused to discuss Mrs May’s role, saying it was ‘an intelligence matter’,
Muslim convert Fiddler, 50, was released from Guantanamo in 2004 after intense pressure from the Labour government of the time. On his return to the UK, he and other British former inmates launched a legal action over their alleged mistreatment. To avoid an embarrassing court battle, which could have revealed British complicity in rendition and torture, ministers agreed to pay millions to settle the claims.
Chris Phillips, the former head of the National Counter Terrorism Security Office,
‘Cash has helped fund Islamic State’
said some of Fiddler’s share ‘has almost certainly’ gone to fund Islamic State. And Lord Carlile, the former independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, told Radio 4’s Today programme: ‘It should never have been paid on the merits. There was absolutely no merit in paying [Fiddler] a penny because plainly he was a terrorist and he was a potentially dangerous terrorist.
‘The issue was the legal disclosure rules. If someone brings a civil action for damages they are entitled to disclosure of material, some of which may be national security material.’ In the Commons, former defence minister Sir Julian Brazier compared the treatment of Fiddler with the scandal of former soldiers facing criminal inquiries over their time in Ulster, saying: ‘There is something profoundly wrong with a criminal justice system which can pursue veterans who risk their lives for this country 40 years on ...while at the same time is capable of paying out £1million to a terror suspect.’
Fiddler’s bombing three days ago was captured on camera by Islamic State, which issued a video of him grinning as he drove his explosives- laden car towards a target in Mosul.
Meanwhile, the semi- detached house he purchased with £220,000 of his compensation money remained abandoned in Stockport, Greater Manchester. His wife Shukee Begum, 34, remains in hiding. Mr Blair said yesterday: ‘ He was not paid compensation by my government. The compensation was agreed in 2010 by the Conservative government.’
Former Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said it was right to have requested Fiddler’s release because he was being held without trial. He told the BBC: ‘We were in a bind and you can’t keep people locked up forever on the basis of suspicion.’
Last night Ukip’s defence spokesman Bill Etheridge said: ‘These repeated compensation payments are funding terrorism. It is time to stop the thinking that there is good in everyone and realise that there are people out there that wish to do us harm.’ Fiddler’s family said in a statement say that the £1million figure was ‘a group settlement including costs for four innocent people including Jamal’.