U.K. Paid Million Pounds To Suspected Al-Qaeda Terrorist Accused Of Planning Attacks On Americans

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Daily Mail:

Taxpayers paid £1million to a suspected terrorist accused of going to al-Qaeda training camps and planning attacks on American and Jewish targets.

Feroz Abbasi was one of 16 men held at Guantanamo Bay who were paid a total of £20million compensation by the UK to settle claims of complicity in their rendition and detention.

U.S. forces captured the 34-year-old from Croydon, South London, in Afghanistan and held him in a series of secret prisons until finally releasing him from Guantanamo in 2005.

It has now emerged that an al-Qaeda ‘supergrass’ told officials in 2004 that Abbasi had been helped travel to Afghanistan by extremist cleric Abu Hamza ‘to receive jihad training’.

The revelations, contained in documents relating to Hamza’s trial in the U.S., have prompted questions over the decision to pay compensation to Abbasi when there were claims he was at the heart of an Islamic terrorist group.

Robin Simcox, an al-Qaeda expert at the Henry Jackson Society, a hawkish neoliberal thinktank, told the Sunday Telegraph he found Abbasi’s pay-off ‘troubling’.

‘The Government agreed a settlement with the Guantánamo detainees because it believed it was better than a lengthy litigation process in which secret intelligence would be exposed and national security could be seriously damaged,’ said Mr Simcox.

‘However, there was never an admittance of liability that the security services had done anything wrong. In Feroz Abbasi’s case, the facts have always pointed towards his involvement with dangerous, extremist causes, which makes his payout all the more troubling.’

A British citizen who moved to South London from Uganda when he was just eight, Abbasi was brought up a moderate Muslim but gradually became more fervent and began attending the radical Finsbury Park mosque in 2000.

He was arrested in Kunduz, Afghanistan, by Northern Alliance forces in December 2001, at the age of 23, and handed over to U.S. troops, who shipped him to Afghanistan in 2002.

Despite repeated claims he would face a U.S. military tribunal, Abbasi was repatriated to Britain just under three years later along with Moazzam Begg, Martin Mubanga and Richard Belmar, and then released when no charges were brought.

An alleged handwritten confession could not be used as evidence in British courts after claims that Abbasi was tortured during his time in U.S. custody.

He and his fellow detainees went in to sue the UK government for complicity in his illegal rendition and detention by the U.S. and in 2010 a secret deal was reached with both sides signing confidentiality agreements.

Part of the settlement was a bumper compensation pay-out for the men, the details of which remain secret and will not be discussed by the Cabinet Office.

But new documents prepared by U.S. prosecutors for the trial of Abu Hamza, the firebrand preacher at the Finsbury Park mosque, claim that Abbasi was close to the heart of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.

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It was part of that “Muslim outreach” thing