Brit who survived Guantanamo

THEY came for Moazzam Begg on the last day of January, 2002. There was a knock on the door: he opened it.

"There was a gun put to my head, before all these men... I don't know what they were, they said they were Pakistan Intelligence, but there were Americans present," he recalls.

Moazzam's wife and children were in the house. He had time just to shout out "don't go in there!" - meaning, leave his wife and children alone - before he was thrown to the ground, hooded, shackled and had his hands tied behind his back.

He had become another victim of America's post-September 11 war on terror, one of hundreds of men rounded up and spirited away for questioning on suspicion of being a supporter of the Taliban or Al-Qaeda. It was to be almost three years before he saw his wife and children again.

Moazzam's "crime" was to be a man who sympathised with Muslim causes and in a suddenly paranoid world, that was tantamount to being a terrorist.

The Birmingham man had run a Muslim bookshop which, according to London law professor Philippe Sands QC, had caused him to be put under British surveillance well before September 11.

He had also, by his own admission, visited Bosnia in 1995 with a Muslim aid organisation - and he sympathised with the plight of Chechen Muslims.

All that, coupled with the fact that in the 1990s he had twice visited training camps in Afghanistan, put him firmly on the US radar when the detentions began.

For the Americans to have regarded such training camp visits as evidence that he was a Taliban or Al-Qaeda supporter just proves how ignorant they were, Moazzam insists.

The first visit, for "a few days" in 1993, was to a camp on the Afghanistan/Pakistan border that was training Kashmiri guerrillas to fight against India. It was not a Taliban camp, he said: at that stage, the Taliban did not even exist.

In 1998, he visited another camp, this one run by Kurds fighting against Saddam Hussein. Quite an irony, he points out, since they would have been allies of the Americans in their war on Saddam.

Whatever the ins-and-outs of that, by January 2002, he was living in Pakistan with his wife and family. They had been evacuated there from the Afghan capital Kabul - where Moazzam says he was helping build a girls school - when the Americans began bombing the city.

They went to Pakistan, Moazzam said, because he had dual nationality, and had friends and family there.

Two months later, there came that knock on the door. Moazzam was abducted into a terrifying, paranoid world, in which he had no rights, no one knew where he was, and his every word was disbelieved.

He was held first in Pakistan, where an apologetic Pakistani intelligence officer explained he had been "illegally detained". Moazzam asked what that meant. "He said: 'It means that you have been taken from your home, and nobody knows where you are, and there is nothing anybody can do because they don't know where you are."

A British MI5 officer told him Britain couldn't offer consular or legal access, and advised Moazzam to "co-operate" with the Americans.

For three weeks he was held and questioned - and then he was moved to Afghanistan, first to Kandahar and then Bagram airbase.

He was held there for 11 months - the worst period, he says, of his incarceration.

Moazzam says he was questioned relentlessly - and sometimes tortured by being hog-tied or starved of sleep. "It could be the middle of the night, or the middle of the day. Sometimes it was for five minutes, sometimes five hours, or ten hours or 15 hours of non-stop questioning." Sometimes he would have his hands tied behind his back and be pushed on the floor. Sometimes, he was stripped naked.

He was asked about his visit to Bosnia: and he was asked, over and over again, about images found on his laptop computer - images of the Kremlin, and of the Pope. They were there because his homepage was the BBC World Service, Moazzam said: but the Americans wouldn't accept that.

"They said: 'We don't believe you, you're not telling us the truth.' They asked: 'Why have you got pictures of the Pope, of the Kremlin? Are you planning to assassinate him, or attack this place?" Looking back, he doesn't believe they truly thought he was going to do any of these things: they were just using a scatter-gun approach, questioning people in the hope someone would crack and reveal something.

It was while at Bagram that he saw the body of an escaped prisoner being dragged back, Moazzam said - and witnessed another prisoner being beaten so badly that he died. The prisoner had been shackled with his hands above his head, Moazzam said, and was being beaten and kicked. It was only a year and a half later, however, that he realised the man had died - when he was shown a photo of the corpse and asked to identify it.

The worst moment came when he heard a woman screaming in the cell next door, making him fear for what could be happening to his loved ones. "I had no idea what had happened to my wife and children," he said.

Early in 2003, he was moved to Guantanamo Bay - not the Camp X-Ray cages that became familiar to the world through TV images, but the more permanent accommodation of Camp Delta.

There he spent much of the next two years in solitary confinement, locked in a cage inside a cell. In a way, his treatment here was better - no physical torture, simply the psychological torment of being shackled and locked up without knowing when he would be released.

His only companions were the American army guards assigned to watch him. There would be one at a time, both of them inside the same room, him inside the cage, the guard outside it.

He struck up odd friendships with some of them. Because he was British and spoke the same language, he had more in common with them than many of the detainees, he said.

Most of them were just ordinary soldiers - working class men who had joined the army to be put through college or see a bit of the world.

"Many of them were greatly upset or disturbed at what was taking place," he says.

Moazzam was released into British custody in January 2005 - almost three years after that knock on his door - without ever being charged or brought before any kind of official tribunal.

He will never forget the moment he was handed over into the custody of British policemen. They were police, he says, but they were sympathetic towards him in a way his American captors had not been.

"They had brought food and snacks and things I hadn't seen for three years - newspapers and a change of clothes."

Since his release, Moazzam has written a book about his ordeal - Enemy Combatant: A British Muslim's Journey To Guantanamo And Back - and now travels around Britain talking about the need for more understanding of Muslim causes.

That is all the more important in Britain following last year's July bombings in London, he said.

He understands that the America had to do something in the wake of September 11. What he cannot and never will understand, he said, is the way the US Government did so. Its all-out war on terror and invasion of Iraq poured fuel on the flames, he said. "What they have done has augmented and proliferated the threat of terrorism."

He was equally scathing, however, about Al-Qaeda. The terrorist organisation has done a "huge amount of damage".

All it has achieved is to stoke suspicion of Muslims everywhere, and to remove any sympathy in the West for legitimate Muslim grievances. "A lot of people have concluded that anybody who has any sympathy for Muslim causes must be linked to Al-Qaeda," he said.

York Against The War

York Against The War helped campaign for Mr Begg's release and has invited him to York to speak today, along with his father, Azmat.

Spokesman John Heawood said the people of York had the right to hear about the abuse of human rights that went on at Guantanamo - an abuse caused by America's all-out war on terror.

Here, in Britain, we are also seeing increasingly repressive measures being taken in the name of the fight on terror, he said - the diminution of civil rights, the move towards ID cards, dilution of the right to trial by jury and control orders for terrorist suspects. "We're all victims of the war on terror," he said.

Moazzam Begg will be at the Fountains Lecture Theatre, at the University College of York St John, at 7.30pm tonight to give a talk. Admission is free.

Mr Begg's book, Enemy Combatant: A British Muslim's Journey To Guantanamo And Back, is published by The Free Press, priced £18.99.

Human rights and Guantanamo

Moazzam Begg was one of more than 650 people detained at the military base at Guantanamo in Cuba, according to British lawyer and law professor Philippe Sands QC, and one of nine British men held there.

In a review of Mr Begg's book published in The Guardian newspaper, Mr Sands said Mr Begg and other detainees were denied basic human rights - including the presumption of innocence, access to lawyers and courts, and extradition proceedings.

Despite being treated as an "enemy combatant", Mr Begg was not caught on any battlefield, Mr Sands pointed out. And the failure to accord him and others basic human and legal rights "caused untold harm to America's reputation, undermining efforts to address the real threat posed by terrorism".

Moazzam Begg on suicide bombers

In many areas of the world - Bosnia, Chechnya, Palestine - Muslim communities are effectively under occupation, said Mr Begg.

Certain actions that are "justifiable in relation to occupation," he said. He thought there was nothing wrong with the use of suicide bombing against military targets. Some Pakistanis strap grenades to their bodies and fling themselves under India tanks, he said. "There is nothing ignoble about that."

He was, however, entirely opposed to the indiscriminate use of suicide bombers to attack civilian targets. "That cannot be justified. That is beyond the pale."

Updated: 09:28 Tuesday, May 09, 2006