Briton paid £1m by UK taxpayers is Isis suicide bomber
A BRITISH Islamic State suicide bomber is a former Guantanamo Bay inmate who was paid £1million compensation by the UK Government.
Muslim convert Ronald Fiddler, 50, detonated a car bomb at an Iraqi army base near Mosul this week.
He was released from the US camp in Cuba in 2004 and successfully claimed compensation after saying British spies knew of his mistreatment. He was freed following intense lobbying by Tony Blair’s Labour government.
He is seen grinning in a picture issued by ISIS as he sits aboard his car bomb with a red switch – to trigger the explosives – next to him.
He pocketed the taxpayer-funded payout after accusing MI6 agents of being complicit in his mistreatment by the Americans. He later fled to join IS in Syria.
The Muslim convert – a web designer from Manchester – carried out his vile attack just two days ago near Mosul. The video was released by terror propagandists last night.
The attack raises urgent questions over what steps the authorities took to monitor Fiddler as he supposedly rejoined British society following his release from Guantanamo. He is
believed to have fled the UK to join IS in Syria as long as three years ago.
‘This is a scandalous situation,’ said Tory MP Tim Loughton. ‘So much for Tony Blair’s assurances that this extremist did not pose a security threat.
‘He clearly was a risk to Britain and our security all along. It adds insult to injury that he was given £1million in compensation because of Blair’s flawed judgement that he was an innocent.’
Liberal Democrat MP John Pugh said: ‘This raises serious questions about the reassurances Labour gave us that this man posed no danger.
‘It is a kick in the teeth that he was given a fortune in taxpayers’ money after claiming he was innocent only to flee to Islamic State and pose a risk to the UK.
‘The Home Office needs to explain how he was able to leave the country so easily despite his background mixing with those at the very top of Islamic terrorism.’
The bomber involved in the attack had originally been identified only as Abu Zakariya al-Britani.
The IS video showed the car driving over a low hill – where a battle is raging for control of Mosul – before cutting to a plume of smoke in the distance.
But last night it emerged that al-Britani was Fiddler’s nom du guerre.
The son of devout Christian Jamaican immigrants, Fiddler converted to Islam in the 1990s. The US authorities concluded he was probably involved in a terrorist attack against the US after they detained him in Afghanistan in 2002.
He was assessed as being an Al Qaeda fighter and considered a ‘high threat to the US’ and other Western powers. He spent two years at Guantanamo.
On his release in 2004 he was flown home and released without charge.
He was released with five others and alongside the three men known as the Tipton Three – Rhuhel Ahmed, Asif Iqbal and Shafiq Rasul.
That year he and three other detainees launched a legal action against the US government, each demanding £5.4million.
‘This is a kick in the teeth’
They claimed that British agents were complicit in their mistreatment at Guantanamo by knowing it was going on.
That legal action was dropped when the Government agreed to pay the men a compensation settlement of up to £1million each.
David Blunkett, who was home secretary at the time, insisted: ‘No one who is returned … will actually be a threat to the security of the British people.’
Shami Chakrabarti, the then head of Liberty who was made a Labour peer last year, said: ‘We are delighted that the five have been released, but let us not forget those that are remaining.’
In one interview with a national newspaper after his release Fiddler said: ‘It was very, very hard times, but I tried to think about nothing but survival.’
At the same time he married, set up a computer business in Manchester and worked as an administrator in an Islamic school. But, probably in 2014, Fiddler travelled to IS-controlled Syria via Turkey, a common route for jihadists.
His journey became known when his wife, Shukee Begum, 34, managed to escape from the terrorist group with their five children.
Kyle Orton, a specialist in Islamist groups at the Henry Jackson Society security think-tank, said: ‘Fiddler is part of a considerable cadre of people released from Guantanamo Bay who have returned straight to the ranks. This keeps happening so the drive to shut the camp has always been a very, very serious threat.
‘Allowing people to be put back in the field is a concrete security threat. The drive to release has been disastrous in terms of the consequences for Western security.’
Afzal Ashraf, a former counter-terrorism adviser to the United States in Iraq, told the BBC that the incident showed ‘some of the people in Guantanamo Bay were up to no good’.