Lawyers Urge Fo to Come Clean on Torture

Lawyers acting for Binyam Mohamed, a British resident incarcerated in Guantánamo Bay, have urged the government to disclose evidence which, they say, would demonstrate he was tortured.

Reprieve, the human rights group, handed the Foreign Office a 55-page dossier, Human Cargo, about the case of the former Kensington cleaner who was rendered to Morocco and Afghanistan before being flown to the US camp on Cuba.

Clive Stafford Smith, Reprieve's director, said Britain's parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee, the ISC, had made clear that British officials knew more about the case than had been disclosed. The ISC said in its report on rendition last year that intelligence passed by the British to the US was used in Mohamed's interrogation and assurances had not been sought from the US about the proper treatment of detainees.

"The UK says that the evidence it has is classified," Stafford Smith said. "The fact that the UK provided information for use in interrogations in Morocco is very important."

A US military defence lawyer at Guantánamo Bay said this week that he had been told by the Pentagon that interrogators had been instructed to destroy notes in case they were called to testify on the treatment of detainees.

Mohamed faces charges of giving material support for terrorism and for conspiring to commit terrorism. The charges relate to an alleged "dirty bomb" plot. Stafford Smith, who recently spent three hours with Mohamed at the US base on Cuba, said that "all the confessions came out of torture", which included the slashing of Mohamed's genitals with a razor in Morocco. Mohamed faces a trial by a US military commission - attacked as unconstitutional and unjust by British ministers - at Guantánamo.

Stafford Smith yesterday accused the US of a cover-up and urged the British government to press Washington to conduct a proper investigation into the case.