John Simpson – The Times UK –
A British Islamic State suicide bomber who targeted coalition forces in Mosul was a former Guantanamo Bay detainee paid £1 million in compensation by the government.
Jamal al-Harith, 50, was identified yesterday by his brother from a photo showing him smiling in the driver’s seat of a 4×4 packed with explosives before he ploughed the car into a military base outside the city in northern Iraq. A video showed his vehicle speeding down a dirt track followed by a plume of smoke. Isis made unverified claims that he caused multiple casualties.
Born in Manchester with the name Ronald Fiddler, Harith converted to Islam in the 1990s. He was found in a Taliban prison in Afghanistan in 2001 and held without charge for two years at Camp X-Ray in Cuba. At one point he was accused of links to Osama bin Laden, the leader of al-Qaeda.
Leon Jameson, Harith’s brother, told The Times he had “wasted his life”. After looking at the image, he added: “It is him, I can tell by his smile. If it is true then I’ve lost a brother, so another family [member] gone.”
Harith was released from Guantanamo in 2004 after lobbying by David Blunkett, home secretary under Tony Blair. He was among a dozen British citizens who alleged torture and UK complicity, prompting payouts from the government of about £20 million.
Lord Carlile, former independent reviewer of terror legislation, suggested the government had been forced into paying Harith thanks to security laws which are looser in Britain than in the United States, where he failed to secure compensation.
“There was absolutely no merit in paying him a penny because plainly he was a terrorist and he was a potentially dangerous terrorist,” Lord Carlile told the Today programme on BBC Radio 4. “The issue was the legal disclosure rules, where if somebody brings a civil action for damages then they are entitled to disclosure of material, some of which may be national security material.
“In my view the UK government and its legal advisers were absolutely right not to disclose to an enemy of the state clear national security material but there is an issue as to why the UK government paid money but not the US government, which has much stricter rules about the disclosure of national security information.”
The revelation that a former prisoner from Camp X-Ray became a suicide bomber targeting western forces will stoke the debate in the US over proposals by the Trump administration to keep Guantanamo open.
In 2001 the British jihadist claimed that he had been backpacking in Pakistan when he paid a lorry driver to take him to Turkey. He said the Taliban had jailed and interrogated him after stopping the truck in Afghanistan. His Guantanamo file included intelligence that, although initially not thought to be linked to al-Qaeda, he had been in Sudan when bin Laden and his network were active there. A Sudanese school where he claimed to have studied did not exist. Having initially been cleared for release in September 2002, he was labelled a “threat to the US, its interests and allies” and held for a further two years, after which he was sent back to the UK. At the time when he and four other men arrived home, Mr Blunkett said: “No one who is returned . . . will actually be a threat to the security of the British people.”
A former website designer, Harith bought a three-bedroom, semi- detached house in Stockport, Greater Manchester, in 2011, using £220,000 of his government payout. He is said to have struggled to find work.
Despite having been a Guantanamo inmate, he managed to leave unhindered for Syria in 2014, raising questions over whether he was being monitored by intelligence services.
Arthur Snell, former head of the antiterror programme Prevent, told Today that there had been failings in the decade between Harith’s return from Guantanamo and his departure for Syria. “There was no mystery to this man. He’s not someone who was unknown to the authorities,” Mr Snell said.
Harith’s second wife, Shukee Begum, 34, also from Manchester, followed him soon after with her five young children. She is thought to be somewhere near the lawless Syrian border with Turkey.
Speaking to Channel 4 from a safehouse in October 2015, she said: “I wanted to know if he had a place in my children’s futures. I wanted to see him, I wanted the children to see their father and the baby to meet him. I was seeing on the news that things were going from bad to worse and I wanted to talk some sense into him.”
Harith was one of three suicide bombers on Monday to target Shia militia and units from the Iraqi army’s Ninth Division. Isis referred to him by the name Abu Zakariya al-Britani.
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http://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/isis-suicide-bomber-got-1m-from-the-taxpayer-b608hqthh