At home with the terror suspects in a state of limbo
on Feb 04 in Articles, Portfolio by philreesThe Sunday Times
Phil Rees has spent months with some of the suspected terrorists released from Belmarsh but now growing suicidal under house arrest
This is possibly the last Sunday afternoon that a devoted father will spend with his five children. Before dawn on Tuesday morning, officials from the Home Office will arrive at his house and escort him to Gatwick airport and a one-way flight to the country of his birth, Algeria.
He is not being forcibly deported; he has decided to leave voluntarily. “I feel like I’m torturing my own family by staying with them,” he told me. “The only way to protect them is to leave.”
Detainee “A” is one of the men certified as terrorists by David Blunkett after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 and who became central characters in the moral and legal debates surrounding Britain’s domestic “war on terror”. He was one of the “Belmarsh 12”, jailed for more than three years without trial and whose incarceration was declared an illegal breach of the European convention on human rights.
Since then, Mr A, as he calls himself, has lived under various levels of hous e arrest — again without a trial — initially under “control order” legislation that was hurriedly introduced in response to the law lords’ ruling. The decision last month by a handful of detainees to return to Algeria has thrown new light on the secretive, unreported lives of “controllees” who have been left decaying in a legal purgatory for more than five years.
Softly spoken and thoughtful, Mr A’s fluent English is peppered with cockney slang. Britain has been his home for 17 years; his children were all born here. His eldest is preparing for his GCSEs this summer.
Under restrictions sought by the Home Office, he must remain indoors for 22 hours a day. His electronic tag tells a private monitoring company if he leaves the house during curfew hours and alerts the police. No one is allowed into his house without Home Office clearance and he is not allowed a mobile or access to the internet.
The restrictions are riddled with farce; I can visit the house and conduct an interview on his doorstep, the frame of the door forming an invisible barrier that neither of us can cross. He can meet whom he wants at his local mosque and travel on public transport unhindered. Yet the government maintains that secret intelligence has shown Detainee A to be a dangerous international terrorist who supports Al-Qaeda.
He was also accused of supplying satellite phones to extremists and of giving a sleeping bag and a pair of boots to Chechen rebels. He does not deny the accusation but says he was doing charitable work for the people of Chechnya: “It’s a Muslim’s duty to help other less fortunate brothers and sisters.”
It was A’s relations with his children that finally made him decide to leave. Their schoolwork had begun to suffer because they could not use the internet at home. His eldest children began to resent him: “You are useless for society, for your community, for your kids, you know. I can’t even do shopping for my wife.”
Gareth Peirce, Detainee A’s defence lawyer, says she is stunned by the increased use of intelligence to detain suspects, when neither the accused nor their lawyers are told what the information is: “We are debarred from knowing anything.”
There are now some 40 men held under partial house arrest, either under control orders or bail conditions imposed by the secretive Special Immigration Appeals Commission. Some of the orders seem to make little sense: Mahmoud Abu Rideh, a terrorist suspect, is subject to restrictions including a 12-hour curfew, but can still travel to Parliament Square.
In December 2001 he was detained under anti-terrorism laws, accused of supporting and raising funds for international terrorist groups. He was moved to Broadmoor hospital in July 2002, but was granted bail in January 2005. At the time, the Special Immigration Appeals Commission held that Mr Rideh “remains rightly certified as a suspected international terrorist who is, on sound grounds, believed to be a risk to national security”.
Mouloud Sihali is another Algerian facing deportation and living under strict control orders as a terror suspect. Mouloud was charged with involvement in a plot to poison thousands with ricin in 2002. He was found not guilty by a jury but was arrested again after the London bombings of July 7, 2005. He was held for four months before being released on special bail, claiming that intelligence files linked him with Al-Qaeda.
Mouloud is another softly spoken, polite and intelligent terror suspect. Handsome and thoughtful, he had plans to study medicine. At 31 he might now be too late. Five years of his life has been taken away, he says, even though the one time when he went before an open court he was found not guilty.
During the three months that I worked on Dispatches: At Home With the Terror Suspects (to be shown tomorrow night on Channel 4 at 8pm) I got to know several of these men fairly well. They are sad, broken people and if they ever were a threat to our national security, they are no longer.
Control orders do not prevent a person breaking the law if they so wish. Three “controllees” have absconded and remain on the run. Mouloud is free to travel on the London Underground.
“If I wanted to, it would be easy for me to bomb or commit an act of terrorism and kill thousands of people,” he says with a dark humour.
The plight of the Belmarsh 12 strains the most cherished tenets of Britain’s legal system. Detention without trial or knowing the evidence against you — albeit under house arrest — was akin to practices that successive UK governments condemned outright in Soviet Russia and the eastern bloc. The government is planning to widen the principle behind control orders to create “Super Asbos” for men suspected of fraud or drug dealing. Mere suspicion will be enough to curb their freedom and they will have no appeal.
We should also remember why the Belmarsh 12 were not deported in 2001: because it would mean returning them to countries that practise torture.
When I said my final goodbye to Detainee A, news had filtered back that two of the detainees, who returned to Algeria last month, “Q” and “K”, had disappeared, believed to be in the custody of Algeria’s feared military security service.
I left Detainee A packing his bags, fearing his fate when he lands in Algeria. But he added: “They can only torture me physically for a week or two. Life under a control order is a never-ending mental torture that I cannot bear.”
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