Babar Ahmad: Jailed And Abused By UK Police For An Alleged Terror Crime In The US
WAS Babar Ahmad, as devour Muslim, assaulted by four police officers – Pcs Nigel Cowley, 33, Roderick James-Bowen, 40, Mark Jones, 43, and Det Con John Donohue, 36 – on 2 December 2003? The system at Southwark Crown Court will decide. The four men will plead not guilty.
When Mr Ahmad was arrested in Decemebr 2003, the four accused were working in the Metropolitan Police’s territorial support group (TSG).
Simon Clement, head of the CPS special crime division said in August 2010:
“Mr Ahmad suffered a number of injuries during that arrest, including heavy bruising to the head, neck, wrists and feet.”
The talk is of 73 injuries.
On 18-Mar-2009:
In a historic, unprecedented victory, the Metropolitan Police admits full liability for subjecting Babar Ahmad to grave abuse tantamount to torture and offers to pay him £60,000 (US$100,000) in damages. The admission, at the High Court in London, receives worldwide press coverage. Babar Ahmad is present in court to hear the admission.
Right now Mr Ahmad is being held in Long Lartin prison in Worcestershire. Babar Ahmad, 36, is the longest-serving prisoner held without charge or trial in the UK.
The United States issued an extradition warrant. But the European Court of Human Rights halted his extradition to the US to face separate terror charges.
He is accused of raising money to support terrorism in Chechnya and Afghanistan via websites and e-mails.
* Mr Ahmad has never been prosecuted in the UK, as there has never been enough evidence that he committed a crime.
Says the man:
I face the possibility of life without parole in solitary confinement under the harshest of prison regimes in a Supermax prison, far from home, family and friends.
What is the case against him? He explains:
The central US allegations against me revolve around a family of websites that provided news in nearly 20 languages on Chechen resistance fighters who were defending their land against the Russian Army’s invasion of Chechnya in the 1990s. According to the US, this was terrorism [The Home Office says Mr Ahmad is accused of providing material support to terrorists]. But according to UK this was, and still is, legal as Chechen resistance fighters have never been proscribed as a terrorist organisation, unlike al-Qa’ida. In fact, the leader of the Chechen resistance has been living in the UK for several years, having been granted asylum.
The US claims jurisdiction because it is alleged that one of the several dozen computer servers on which the websites were hosted was located in the US for approximately 18 months from early 2000. The US accepts that the websites were also hosted on computer servers around the world and that “at all times material to the indictment” I was living in the UK. Other peripheral allegations against me are that a US naval battleship plan document was allegedly seized from me in December 2003. The media raised uproar about this document when I was arrested on the extradition warrant. However, in a letter to Sadiq Khan MP, the former Attorney-General Lord Goldsmith wrote that it could not even be proven that it was in my possession. Another document seized from my parents’ house was a tourist brochure (belonging to my father) of the Empire State Building in New York, which prompted the media to report “al-Qa’ida planned to attack Empire State Building”. That brochure is dated 1973, which is when my father visited New York. What is more incredible is that UK police returned this brochure to my father after I was arrested on the extradition warrant, yet it still forms part of the evidence against me.
So. Should the US be able to make a prisoner of a UK citizen who has been charged with no criminal offence in his own country..?
Posted: 22nd, September 2010 | In: Reviews Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
