The Islamic State suicide bomber who carried out an attack on an Iraqi army base near Mosul this week was a former Guantanamo Bay detainee the British government compensated with £1 million following his release in 2004.
Jamal al-Harith, born Ronald Fiddler and also known by the name of Abu-Zakariya al-Britani, converted to Islam in the 1990s before U.S. officials arrested him in Pakistan in 2001 on suspicion of sympathizing with the Taliban and potentially being a “high threat to the U.S.” who was “probably involved in a former terrorist attack against the U.S.,” The Telegraph reported. When al-Harith was sent to Guantanamo Bay in Cuba in 2002, the British government under then-Prime Minister Tony Blair lobbied extensively for his release.
“So much for Tony Blair’s assurances that this extremist did not pose a security threat.”
“No-one who is returned … will actually be a threat to the security of the British people,” then-Home Secretary David Blunkett said, according to The Telegraph.
But al-Harith ultimately traveled to Syria through Turkey in 2014 with the intention of joining Islamic State forces before detonating the car bomb in Mosul. The number of casualties, if any, has not been verified at this time.
“The martyrdom-seeking brother Abu Zakariya al-Britani — may Allah accept him — detonated his explosives-laden vehicle on a headquarters of the Rafidhi army and its militias in Tal Kisum village, southwest of Mosul,” the Islamic State’s statement read.
Al-Harith’s actions following his release from Guantanamo Bay — as well as the British government’s previous assurances that prisoners such as al-Harith wouldn’t pose “a threat to the security of the British people” — are now receiving intense scrutiny.
After claiming to be the victim of torture during his stay at Guantanamo Bay and that British officials were complicit in the abuse, al-Harith raked in the £1 million from the British government in compensation some time later following his release. Although it is unknown what al-Harith ultimately did with the British taxpayers’ money, some speculate that he may have handed some of it directly over to the Islamic State, The Telegraph reported.
A former neighbor of al-Harith’s told Britain’s Express newspaper in 2015 that “It’s unbelievable that he’s been allowed to go and fight in Syria without anyone noticing. We have paid him to become a terrorist.”
Tim Houghton, a Conservative Member of Parliament, called the entire debacle a “scandalous situation.”
“So much for Tony Blair’s assurances that this extremist did not pose a security threat,” Houghton said, according to The Telegraph.
In response, Blair himself issued a statement acknowledging that while “it is correct that Jamal al-Harith was released from Guantanamo Bay at the request of the British Government in 2004,” he was “not paid compensation by my Government.”
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“The compensation was agreed in 2010 by the Conservative Government,” Blair said in his statement, adding, “The fact is that this was always a very difficult situation where any Government would have to balance proper concern for civil liberties with desire to protect our security, and we were likely to be attacked whatever course we took … But those who demanded their release should not be allowed to get away with now telling us that it is a scandal that it happened.”
As the United Kingdom continues to wrestle with the implications of its part in the al-Harith situation and its counter-terrorism efforts, many are calling for intense scrutiny so similar mistakes are never repeated.
“It also throws into question some of the organisations that were supporting him, that brought him back [from Guantanamo],” Afzal Ashraf, a former counter-terrorism adviser to the U.S. in Iraq, told the BBC. “Some of them were associated a little too closely with this radical ideology, and they use the legal system — freedoms of speech, the importance of the rule of law — in order to subvert some of our systems in the UK and elsewhere.”
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