Britain pays Guantanamo prisoner ‘substantial’ amount in torture case

Jan. 12 (UPI) — Britain has paid a “substantial sum” to a Guantanamo Bay detainee who sued the British government for its alleged complicity in his torture and detention, his legal team said.

Lawyers for Abu Zubaydah, 54, alleged that British intelligence services gave questions to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency while it tortured him at various black sites around the world between 2002 and 2006.

Zubaydah’s full name is Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn. He is a Palestinian who grew up in Saudi Arabia and has Saudi citizenship. He’s been held in the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, since 2006 without charges.

He is one of 15 who are still being held despite judgments and official reports detailing his torture.

He has been called a “forever prisoner.”

In 2022, Lithuania paid Zubaydah more than $100,000 in for torture he sustained in the country. In 2015, Poland paid him and another prisoner $133,000 each for torture they sustained on Polish soil.

The amount of compensation from the United Kingdom was not revealed.

“It is important, symbolically and practically, that U.K. pays for its role in our client’s torture,” said Helen Duffy, his attorney. “The settlement provides a measure of redress and implicit recognition of our client’s intolerable suffering at the hands of the CIA, enabled by the United Kingdom.”

Zubaydah was first taken in Pakistan in March 2002. The United States claimed he was a high-ranking member of al-Qaida, but it has since said it no longer believes that he was even a member.

Two British parliamentary reports in 2018 said that MI5 and MI6 gave questions to the CIA knowing he was being tortured.

Internal MI6 messages revealed that it believed his treatment would have “broken” 98% of U.S. special forces had they endured it. Four years later, British intelligence sought assurances about his treatment.

According to a U.S. Senate investigation into the CIA’s use of torture, Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times in a single month, locked for more than 11 days in a coffin-sized box and left to lie in his own waste, stripped naked and beaten, suspended from hooks just above the floor, and kept awake for seven days and doused with cold water when he lost consciousness.

“This case is deeply relevant today, as states ride roughshod over international law and the world looks to other states to respond,” Duffy said. “There are critical lessons about the cost of cooperating with the U.S. or other allies flouting international norms.”