He was beaten and tortured, his pregnant wife was shackled ...
WHEN I met Abdul Hakim Belhadj and his wife at their home in Istanbul two years ago, I was greeted with a hospitality which made me a little ashamed. I was given coffee and sweet cakes in their sitting room as we spoke about his troubled past.
I was there to hear the story of how Mr Belhadj endured six years of torture as a prisoner of the secret police of Libyan dictator Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. His wife Fatima Boudchar, meanwhile, had been jailed when she was four months pregnant.
Many thousands of Libyans suffered similar treatment, but what made this couple’s story so remarkable was that their initial kidnap and ‘rendition’ had been facilitated by MI6.
Dark secrets about what went on in Libya might have remained hidden, but after Gaddafi’s 2011 overthrow, files came to light in Libya’s foreign ministry which Whitehall would rather had remained buried. The sacking of government buildings in Tripoli provided stark evidence of British complicity in torture – in return for Gaddafi’s friendship and co-operation, and a fortune in oil contracts.
The files were just one piece of an international web of torture and espionage which finally culminated in yesterday’s extraordinary apology to 52-year-old Mr Belhadj from the British Government.
He had first fled Libya aged 21, under threat of arrest for his membership of an Islamist group opposed to the Gaddafi regime. He admits he travelled to Afghanistan in the late Eighties, where he joined the Western- backed jihad against the Soviet occupation. Another Arab who spent time in the same Afghan training camps was Al Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden.
Mr Belhadj told me that he met Bin Laden ‘maybe three’ times. The Saudi asked him to join his terror group, he said, but he refused. His only aim was to overthrow Gaddafi.
But the association with the terror mastermind would come back to haunt him.
In 1995, Mr Belhadj returned home as head of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), an underground paramilitary organisation dedicated to Gaddafi’s downfall. But the LIFG was soon infiltrated and broken up. Mr Belhadj fled again and spent much of the next decade as a fugitive, in Iran, Iraq and Pakistan.
Eventually he settled in China. In February 2004, he and his Moroccan-born wife were arrested at Beijing airport when the French passports they were travelling with were spotted as forgeries. During our interview, he told me his plan was to fly to the UK via Malaysia and claim asylum here like many former members of their Islamic fighting group. But their arrest put paid to that.
Mr Belhadj said he told the authorities he had arrived in China from Malaysia. As a result, the couple were deported to Kuala Lumpar, where they were again arrested on arrival. A Libyan friend in the UK heard of Mr Belhadj’s incarceration and travelled to Malaysia to plead his case.
‘He went to the British embassy and revealed to them who I really was. He... did not realise what was going to happen as a result,’ he told me. ‘At this point... MI6 became involved.’ And the trap began to close.
Other intelligence agencies were informed, most probably by MI6. One of them was Libya’s.
Given that the Libyan leader had long been a bogeyman for the West, you might wonder why MI6 was co- operating with Gaddafi. But three months earlier he had signalled a rapprochement with the West by renouncing the use of weapons of mass destruction.
SO it was that Britain chose to help Gaddafi in his war against his Islamic enemies. The Libyan intelligence services in Tripoli matched a photograph of Mr Belhadj taken in custody in Kuala Lumpar with one they held on their files.
As he told me this at his home, he laughed and shook his head ruefully. ‘When I was told [by the Malaysians] that Libya wanted me back, you can imagine how I felt. I told them, “they will kill me”.’
Mr Belhadj did not know it was our own MI6, and in particular Sir Mark Allen, the service’s head of counter- terrorism, who were claiming credit for the ‘coup’.
He said: ‘ There was a letter I later saw from MI6 to Musa Kusa (head of Gaddafi’s intelligence service) which said “I am going to give you a big-game trophy”. And that trophy was me!’
The Malaysians put the couple on a flight to Bangkok on March 7, 2004. Mr Belhadj recalled: ‘I said to my wife, “Be brave, because something bad is going to happen”.’ It did. They were greeted in Bangkok by masked figures who put them in a van and began to beat them. Mr Belhadj believes they were Americans. They wanted him to tell them the whereabouts of Bin Laden.
He and his wife were taken to a ‘black site’ – one of the CIA’s secret interrogation centres used for the imprisonment and torture of those who had been abducted.
Speaking to the Mail in London yesterday, Mrs Boudchar, 41, takes up the harrowing story.
‘They (the US) shackled me to a wall and then strapped me to a stretcher for 17 hours. They did not give me any food and they did not give me any water – is that not torture? I still get nightmares.
‘They strapped me to a stretcher and then they brought me to the plane. I had ear defenders on and my eyes were taped so I could not see what was going on.’
She said one of her eyes had been partly open and the tape was applied directly on to it. ‘I screamed and shouted but they just kept it so it was stuck while my eye was still open. It was extremely painful. When they lifted the tape my eyelash and eyebrows came off. It lasted 17 hours.’
Mrs Boudchar said she did not know her husband was on the plane until she heard him screaming. ‘It was only when we landed and he started screaming that I knew he was with me. My husband was screaming really loud and I think I realised he was being tortured.’ She said she heard men speaking Arabic with a Libyan dialect, adding: ‘I realised we were in Libya.’
The couple were transported to Tajoura prison outside Tripoli, where Mrs Boudchar spent the next four months. She gave birth
to son Abderrahim, now 13, three weeks after being released. But her husband spent another six years in the prison, during which time he was tortured and interrogated by foreign agents, some who were believed to be British.
Mrs Boudchar – who yesterday thanked law firm Leigh Day and the Reprieve charity, who spent years fighting on the couple’s behalf – accused former Prime Minister Tony Blair of committing a ‘criminal act’. She said: ‘This is a criminal act as far as Blair is concerned. As far as I am concerned he entered into a financial benefit deal because he handed me over. We were the prize for that deal.’
Mr Belhadj told me that when his blindfold was removed for the first time since Bangkok, he was confronted with Gaddafi’s feared intelligence chief Kusa, who interrogated him before he received a savage beating. His first meal in custody was served in a dog’s bowl and laced with pins.
Now let us remind ourselves who arranged this. On March 18, 2004, a fax was sent by ‘Mark in London’ for ‘the urgent personal attention of Musa Kusa’. The ‘Mark’ is understood to be Sir Mark Allen.
Much of the fax concerned arrangements for an impending visit by Prime Minister Tony Blair to Libya. But it ended: ‘Most importantly I congratulate you on the safe arrival of [Mr Belhadj]. This was the least we could do for you and for Libya, to demonstrate the remarkable relationship we have built over recent years. I am so glad.
‘The intelligence [about Mr Belhadj’s arrest in Bangkok] was British. I know I did not pay for the air cargo, but I feel I have the right to deal with you direct on this, and am very grateful for the help you are giving on this.’
As Mr Belhadj was discovering, his bitter enemies in the Libyan leadership were Britain’s enemies no longer.
To underscore this point, in a now infamous encounter on March 25 that year, Blair met Gaddafi in a tent outside Tripoli. The so-called ‘deal in the desert’ coincided with the announcement that Anglo-Dutch oil firm Shell had signed a deal worth up to £550 million for gas exploration rights off the Libyan coast.
Such high-level diplomacy meant little to Mr Belhadj, sitting in solitary confinement in his tiny cell. For him, life brought only torture and interrogation.
Appallingly, he was often suspended by the wrists, which were secured behind his back. He was beaten on the soles of his feet and elsewhere with cables. Often, he feared he would be executed – but he was kept alive because he was useful to the regime in its new friendship with the West. Kusa gave him lists of Libyan dissidents who had escaped to countries around Europe. He was told to give up the names to visiting foreign intelligence officials from nations such as Spain, Italy and France, and say they were Al Qaeda terrorists.
Crucially, he told me he was visited three times by MI6. Before the visits, he was given names of UK-based Libyan dissidents. He had never heard of those on the lists, but was told: ‘Just shut up and tell them the names.’ He told me: ‘I very well remember the visits of the British. Once there was a woman with two men. One of the men had a beard and was strongly built. He looked like he was military.
‘When the British arrived in the room, the Libyan intelligence officers left. But of course I knew they were listening. So I started to talk to the British through sign language. In this way I told them I was being tortured to say these things I was telling them. They made signs back to me to say that they understood.’ They understood, but did nothing.
It is believed the information and names he gave MI6 while in prison led to the arrest of Gaddafi opponents in the UK.
Mr Belhadj spent four years in his little blackpainted cell, and his eyesight was permanently damaged. He was not allowed to shower for 14 months, and saw his wife and newborn son only once in four and a half years.
In 2009, he was tried and sentenced to death for terrorism, but a year later was released on parole as part of a deal designed to lessen the threat from Gaddafi’s Islamic opponents.
Shortly afterwards the Libyan revolution took place, supported by the RAF. Mr Belhadj joined the fight and – amazingly given what had gone before – when Gaddafi fell, he was placed in charge of security for David Cameron when he visited Tripoli in triumph.
Today, Mr Belhadj is a politician in Libya. As for his torturer, Musa Kusa? He promptly defected and sought refuge. In Britain.