"...CIA 'Sent student to Morocco to be tortured'"

MI6 and CIA 'Sent student to Morocco to be tortured'

Sunday December 11, 2005
The Observer

An Ethiopian student who lived in London claims that he was brutally tortured with the involvement of British and US intelligence agencies.

Binyam Mohammed, 27, says he spent nearly three years in the CIA's network of 'black sites'. In Morocco he claims he underwent the strappado torture of being hung for hours from his wrists, and scalpel cuts to his chest and penis and that a CIA officer was a regular interrogator.

After his capture in Pakistan, Mohammed says British officials warned him that he would be sent to a country where torture was used. Moroccans also asked him detailed questions about his seven years in London, which his lawyers believe came from British sources.

Western agencies believed that he was part of a plot to buy uranium in Asia, bring it to the US and build a 'dirty bomb' in league with Jose Padilla, a US citizen. Mohammed signed a confession but told his lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, he had never met Padilla, or anyone in al-Qaeda. Padilla spent almost four years in American custody, accused of the plot. Last month, after allegations of the torture used against Mohammed emerged, the claims against Padilla were dropped. He now faces a civil charge of supporting al-Qaeda financially.
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2005/12/11/113712/25
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,1664612,00.html

London suspect in CIA torture claim
A FORMER London student accused of terrorism claims he was tortured under the CIA’s policy of flying prisoners to countries that use extreme interrogation techniques.

The Pentagon alleges that Binyam Mohammed plotted to detonate a radioactive “dirty bomb” in America and received instructions from Al-Qaeda’s senior leaders, including the architect of the 9/11 attacks.

In a diary written by Mohammed and seen by The Sunday Times, he claims two British officials knew in advance of his transfer to Morocco and says his interrogators told him they were being assisted by MI5.

A few weeks later, Mohammed claims he was handed to a team of Americans “dressed in black, with masks, wearing what looked like Timberland boots”. He was stripped naked, photographed, given an enema and put on a plane with shackles, earphones and a blindfold. A report in The Washington Post last week attributed a virtually identical procedure to the CIA’s “Rendition Group”

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1920255,00.html