Pakistani intelligence and Americans 'abduct' Briton

Fresh fears about the circumstances in which alleged terror suspects are being detained by US authorities have emerged after Pakistani intelligence was accused last night of working with Americans to kidnap a British man, bundling him into the boot of a car and smuggling him to Afghanistan.

The case is being closely scrutinised by British and US lawyers who believe it reflects a trend of casual detention of terrorist suspects in the region, with apparent disregard for international law.

A friend of Birmingham-born Moazzam Begg's family, Imran Khan, said Mr Begg was taken from his rented flat in Islamabad four weeks ago by two Pakistani officers accompanied by two Americans.

"They went into the house and grabbed him and put him into the boot of the car. He managed to phone his dad and me and said he was being taken away but then the phone went dead."

Mr Begg's family was told by a man claiming to be from the Red Cross that their son was being held by Americans in a prison in Kandahar.

The family has lodged a writ of habeas corpus in court in Faisalabad demanding that the Pakistani authorities produce Mr Begg along with £8,000 they say was taken from his house.

A judge ruled yesterday that Mr Begg had been illegally removed from Pakistan and demanded that he be produced before the court on March 14.

Mr Begg - who had worked as a translator in Britain and was teaching in Kabul - is being represented by British lawyer Gareth Peirce, who also represents some of the British men being held at Camp X-Ray in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Ms Peirce said Mr Begg's case was an example of how people taken by the US authorities were not necessarily "combatants" or members of al-Qaida, as the US claims.

The position of the men being held at the camp is the subject of a legal wrangle in the US. Recently, the Pentagon admitted that it had yet to find enough evidence for any of the men to face a military tribunal, in spite of defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld's earlier claims that the men being held were the "hardest of the hardcore" of al-Qaida.

Mr Begg's situation could be used by lawyers to help show that in many cases the men detained were not fighters with the Taliban and al-Qaida but were simply picked up because they were foreign nationals.

Ms Peirce said: "This is fundamental to the cases of the other detainees. We do not know how they were detained and this is an example of how people are being picked off the streets and captured by gangs.

"This is tantamount to unlawful hijack, kidnapping."

A Foreign Office spokesman said it had been told by the Begg family that their son was being detained in Kandahar. He said: "We have yet to formally identify the detainee's identity or nationality and we are unable to confirm any more details about him. We are in close touch with the US about this."

It is not known why Mr Begg was targeted, though intelligence sources may have believed he was the same Moazzam Begg whose name appeared on a photocopy of a money transfer found in an al-Qaida camp requesting that a London branch of Pakistan's Habib Bank AG Zurich credit the account of a Moazzam Begg in Karachi for an unspecified sum of money.

At the time, US and Pakistani officials said they did not know who Begg was but would try to find him.

Mr Begg, 35 and married with three children, moved to Afghanistan from Bordesley Green, Birmingham, in August last year. He bought a house in Kabul and set up a school. The family fled the Afghan capital four weeks after the US bombing started and rented a house in Islamabad.

Pakistani solicitor Abdul Rahman Siddiqui, who represents Mr Begg's family, said: "He was taken by some unknown agencies during the first week of February. There is no evidence against him. He was peacefully in a rented house on a regular basis. He is not a casual man who has just come here."

More than 100 British Muslim families emigrated to Afghanistan before September 11 in line with the Koranic teaching called Hijrah, meaning migration from a bad way of life for a good or more righteous way.

Mr Khan said: "There are people who genuinely went there to live. They weren't fighters. They were just living there. But because they are in Afghanistan people assume they are extremists.

"Yes he did sympathise with the Muslim cause; he did feel that but still that doesn't make him an extremist."

Mr Begg's father, Azmat, said yesterday: "This is terrible. If my son has done something the evidence should be put up. He has been bundled into a car and we don't know where he is. His wife is due to have a baby in April. The Foreign Office are doing nothing to help us."