Gunpoint terror raid on Afghan flown in by RAF
Commando on mercy flight held at UK quarantine hotel ‘over links to jihadis’
AN AFGHAN rescued from Kabul by the RAF has been arrested as a suspected Taliban terrorist in Manchester.
Armed police swooped on the 33-year-old with alleged jihadi links in a pre-dawn raid at his city centre quarantine hotel.
He had worked for Afghan special forces alongside British soldiers. When Kabul fell to the insurgents, he was airlifted out on an RAF mercy flight.
He was controversially given a seat while loyal translators who had served the British Army were left behind.
The man, whose identity is known to the Daily Mail, arrived in the UK on August 21 with his wife and children, and they were placed in the Park Inn hotel in Manchester for Covid quarantine because Afghanistan is a ‘red list’ country.
But shortly after 4am on August 31, antiterror police burst into the room where the family was sleeping. He was arrested on suspicion of terrorism and is being held at top-security HMP Belmarsh in London.
Whitehall sources last night described the operation as ‘extremely sensitive’.
There are claims the Afghan, an intelligence officer who served with an elite force working with British troops against the insurgents, had been accused of being a spy for the Taliban.
According to the claims, his alleged double-crossing was linked to devastating Taliban attacks on Western-backed Afghan special force soldiers including a commander who is currently recovering from life-changing injuries at a hospital in the Midlands. Individuals who had served with the suspect said he had been questioned while in Afghanistan about missing explosives linked to the Taliban and large sums of currency which disappeared.
Despite all this, in the chaos of the Kabul evacuation as the insurgents swept to power, he was cleared to board an RAF rescue flight to Dubai on August 20.
The family changed planes there for a flight to Birmingham, arriving the next morning. They then began ten days of quarantine at the Park Inn hotel, which coincidentally overlooks the scene of the 2017 Manchester Arena terror attack.
The Afghan’s wife and their two children were with him when gun-toting officers in black uniforms shouting ‘police, police, police’ swept into their room. She said: ‘everyone had been asleep and woke in shock. My two children were terrified. They told my husband to say goodbye to his family and said he was being deported back to Afghanistan.’
Officers seized the man’s laptop computer, mobile phones, SIM cards, money and passport together with other documents and marched him out to a vehicle.
His wife claimed to friends she and the children were told nothing about his whereabouts for more than a week. Then yesterday, she was given information that he was being held at Belmarsh, in south-east London which is Britain’s highest security prison. Under anti-terrorism laws, a suspect can be held for up to 14 days without charge.
The authorities stonewalled questions about him yesterday, with Greater Manchester Police initially claiming to know nothing about an armed raid on a city centre hotel. The force directed inquiries to the
Home Office, which also declined to comment. A Government spokesman said: ‘We do not comment on individual cases.’ Staff at the Park Inn hotel said they had been told not to comment.
A Whitehall source told the Mail the case related to alleged terror offences. It is understood the arrest was conducted by Greater Manchester Police officers at the behest of the Home Office. The arrest will raise disturbing questions about how a terror suspect was brought to the UK, and also raise fears others sympathetic to insurgents have slipped into the country via the RAF airlifts.
The undue haste of last month’s Kabul evacuation – after ministers spent years ignoring repeated warnings from the Mail and others – meant there was limited time for background security checks on those being flown out by the RAF. The Daily Mail’s Betrayal of the Brave campaign – which has helped hundreds of interpreters who risked their lives serving the British military – has highlighted how their seats on rescue flights were instead taken by Afghan special forces who chose not to fight incoming Taliban.
The Ministry of Defence declined to comment.