Libyan spy wins appeal for asylum in UK

Member of Gaddafi’s secret police feared he would be persecuted and tortured if he was sent back to Libya

A LIBYAN spy who worked for Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s brutal secret police has won a legal battle to be granted asylum in the UK.

The 30-year-old man, named only as MS in court documents, was a member of Libya’s feared Internal Security Service and reported on students and neighbours suspected of opposing the regime. A UK court has upheld his claim that if he is deported to Libya he faces persecution and torture.

The case follows revelations in The Sunday Telegraph that the Home Office has secretly excluded from Britain the prime suspect in the murder of WPC Yvonne Fletcher. Libyan Saleh Ibrahim Mabrouk, who had claimed asylum in 2011 after the fall of Gaddafi, was stopped from returning to the UK after he visited Libya last year.

Last night Andrew Bridgen, Conservative MP for North West Leicestershire, told The Telegraph: “The British sense of fair play is being stretched beyond its elastic limit by what appear to be ludicrous judgments granted to refugees and asylum seekers.” In the new case, MS, who worked in one of Gaddafi’s prisons, fled Libya for the UK after the fall of the regime.

He sought asylum in 2013 claiming protection under the Human Rights Act, saying if he returned to Libya he would suffer retribution from those whom he had informed on, and feared being tortured by Gaddafi’s enemies.

Initially, his claim for asylum was refused by the Home Secretary on the grounds that he had “aided and abetted crimes against humanity” through his work with the secret police. Home Office lawyers argued that four students, a university lecturer and a neighbour were all arrested by Gaddafi’s feared ISS after MS passed on his intelligence. Some of them were held in Jdeida Prison where MS later worked.

Government lawyers argued that MS’s involvement in crimes against humanity meant he fell outside the protection of the international conventions for the protection of refugees. But MS appealed against the decision, arguing he did not know that Gaddafi and the ISS were involved in torture and murder.

Now a judge has ruled in MS’s favour, upholding his appeal in the Upper Immigration Tribunal.

In his written judgment, Judge Andrew Grubb said: “I am satisfied that the judge [the first to hear his appeal] reached a rational finding for sustainable reasons that the appellant was to be believed and that, as a result, it had not been established that there were ‘serious reasons’ to consider that he was guilty of a crime against humanity through his involvement in the ISA (ISS) between 2010 and 2011. The judge was entitled... to allow the appellant’s appeal on asylum grounds.”

A Home Office spokesman said: “We are working hard to secure our borders and restore trust in our immigration system, which includes reform of the asylum system to more thoroughly determine genuine asylum claims from those which are meritless and seek to abuse the system.”

Last week Boris Johnson said he would consider reopening the criminal inquiry into the prime suspect linked to the murder of WPc Yvonne Fletcher.

He made the pledge after The Sunday Telegraph reported that Saleh Ibrahim Mabrouk had been arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to murder in 2015, but the case against him was controversially dropped on the grounds of national security in 2017.

WPc Fletcher was shot dead outside the Libyan embassy in London in 1984. Mabrouk was a senior member of the “revolutionary committee” that ran the Libyan embassy at the time. He was expelled from Britain in the aftermath but allowed back in 2000 after Tony Blair restored relations with Libya.