"My nightmare of torture and assault" by Briton held in Guantanamo

By Severin Carrell, Raymond Whitaker, and Andrew Buncombe
January 30, 2005

One of the four Britons freed from Guantanamo Bay last week has alleged being tortured, nearly suffocated, and repeatedly assaulted in American detention, The Independent on Sunday revealled.

In the first detailed account to emerge since their release, Moazzam Begg, 35, from Birmingham, has accused his US captors of threatening his family, killing fellow detainees, and interrogating him more than 250 times. His 25-page testimony was written in solitary confinement at Guantanamo Bay last year for an American tribunal hearing.

It details, for the first time, why he visited Islamist training camps in Afghanistan, and describes the night in 2002 when he was captured in Pakistan by US agents.

Mr Begg claims that while he was held by the Americans at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan in 2002, he was "dragged into an isolation room, my hands shackled from behind to my ankles, and a suffocating hood placed over my head. I was struck about the head several times, then left in that manner on the floor for several hours, only to be interrogated again."

Editor's note: All of these older articles are no longer available on Marc Parent's Blog. My apologies.