MI5 secret docs expose failure in Libya

UK security service MI5 said on Thursday that a secret UK-Libyan rendition program in which two Libyan opposition leaders were kidnapped and flown to Tripoli along with their families had eventually proved counterproductive. 

An intelligence assessment by the MI5 published by the Guardian showed that once the two Libyan opposition figures had been handed over to the regime of former Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, their place in the opposition camp were taken by others who wanted to bring the group closer to al-Qaeda.

The two were Abdel Hakim Belhaj and Sami al-Saadi from the anti-Gaddafi Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG). They were seized in Thailand and Hong Kong in March 2004 with the assistance of the UK’s intelligence service MI6, and were “rendered” to Tripoli along with Belhaj’s pregnant wife and Saadi’s wife and four children.

The classified MI5 intelligence assessment was among hundreds of highly sensitive Libyan and British files that were discovered in official buildings that had been abandoned during the 2011 revolution that led to the overthrow and death of Muammar Gaddafi.

The papers that were recovered during the revolution show that Britain’s intelligence agencies engaged in a series of joint operations with Gaddafi’s government and that some of the information extracted from victims of rendition was used as evidence during control order and deportation proceedings in the courts in the UK.

Belhaj and Saadi are both mentioned to have said in the classified documents that they were beaten, whipped, subjected to electric shocks, deprived of sleep and threatened while being held at Tajoura prison outside Tripoli.

They say they were also interrogated by British intelligence officers, and Belhaj says he made it clear, by sign language, that he was being tortured.

The discovery of the documents that exposed the existence of the UK-Libyan rendition operations had caused widespread dismay in Westminster, even before the emergence of the latest report, which makes clear that one consequence of these operations was that the terrorist organisation that posed the greatest threat to the UK at that time was strengthened.

A criminal investigation into the affair was opened in January 2012 after Dominic Grieve, the then attorney general, wrote to the Metropolitan police commissioner, Bernard Hogan-Howe. After a three-year investigation codenamed Operation Lydd, detectives handed their report to the Crown Prosecution Service last month.

Jack Straw, who was foreign secretary at the time, is among the people who have been questioned by police. His office says he was interviewed as a witness, the Guardian report adds.

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