It took more than two years for British diplomats to secure the extradition of Hashem Abedi, the brother of the Manchester Arena suicide bomber, amid allegations that the UK government had paid 9 million pounds as a “bribe” for aid, and that it was complicit in his torture under direct monitoring by the UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
Hashem Abedi, now 22, the youngest of the two brothers, was arrested in Libya alongside his father Ramadan, shortly after his older brother Salman carried out the attack on May 22, 2017.
It took more than two years for British diplomats to secure his extradition of HaCounter anti-terrorist officers, and a warrant for his arrest was issued.
Abedi is facing charges of mass murder for his role in planning the most serious terrorist attack on UK soil in two decades.
In closed court sessions, which could not be made public under UK law until the jury reached its verdict, the British government was charged with bribing the Libyan authorities in a million-pound aid package in exchange for Abedi’s extradition.
He was finally extradited in July 2019, almost two years after Boris Johnson – the then Secretary of State – visited Tripoli and allegedly offered a sum of £ 9.2 to help Libya deal with the terrorist threat and tackle illegal immigration.
During Johnson’s second visit to the country in less than six months, which was in August 2017, he met with the Head of the Presidential Council of the Government of National Accord, Fayez Al-Sarraj, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Mohamed Sayala , and the then Head of the High Council of State, Abd al-Rahman Al-Swaihli. The four discussed the United Kingdom’s support for Libya.
Abedi’s lawyer, Stephen Camlich, told the Old Bailey newspaper in London that the aid money was a bribe to secure the delivery of his client, and that the operation was illegal under Libyan law, adding that “the British had actually bribed the Libyans” to get Hashem.
Hashem and his father were detained after their arrest by the Special Deterrence Force, the most powerful militia of Tripoli – according to the Guardian – at its base at Mitiga airport along with dozens of suspected terrorists and fighters captured during the conflict, and with the prison subjected to repeated attacks by rival militias that are trying to free their fellow members, the race began to hand over Abedi to the UK.
At the time, the British ambassador to Libya, Peter Millett, in October 2017, handed over extradition documents to the Libyan Prosecutor to start the “lengthy process”.
One of the obstacles was that the request for extradition was at odds with a treaty signed during the era of Muammar Gaddafi, which did not allow Libya to extradite its citizens to the United Kingdom.
A Western source said that Abedi entered Libya with a British passport, and that Libyan justice officials finally decided that he could be considered British and extradited him under the terms of the treaty.
In a report reminiscent of the episodes in which British security services were involved in serious human rights violations in the years after September 11, Abedi claimed that he was held in solitary confinement from the moment of his arrest, handcuffed and blindfolded, and that he was forced to sign a 40-page confession with a fingerprint under “Extreme Coercion,” where MI5 and MI6 officers visited him twice in the detention center, which his British lawyers described as a” torture institution”.
Abedi’s allegations of torture were supported by medical evidence, including photos taken by a British consular official showing signs of his back, arms and ankle, and he was then transferred from the detention center to a clinic to treat a thigh injury.
Abedi’s lawyer said that MI5 and MI6 knew that Hashem was being tortured, but that they continued to interrogate him about the main aspects of the British investigation.
Abedi said that he was “arrested on the day after the bombing, until the end of May, and questions were asked about people in Manchester and addresses, saying none of his torturers [the Libyans] could know evidence that they were provided with by the British authorities.
He added that they should have received questions either from the Manteline [name of the Manchester bombing investigation] or from the security services or from both, confirming that this situation of interrogation under torture continued for about a month.
Abedi’s older brother, Ismail, who remained in the United Kingdom, had alerted the British government that his brother and father were being tortured in Libyan custody, and the lawyer said, at one point, British intelligence officers interrogated Abedi in the presence of members of the militia which allegedly tortured him in order to sign the confession on June 23, claiming that extradition in conjunction with Abedi’s torture amounted to ill-treatment and called for the trial to be suspended.
Prosecutors did not deny the allegation of British complicity in the torture of Abedi, but they went on to successfully argue that his trial should continue regardless of his treatment in Tripoli.
In the aftermath of 9/11, British intelligence officers were repeatedly involved with well-known intelligence agencies using torture, but the government has consistently rejected these allegations, however; in 2018 the British Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee confirmed that MI5 and MI6 officers were involved in human rights violations, yet they concluded that those violations were out of date.
A Libyan couple has been issued an apology for the British security services’ involvement in their kidnapping and extradition to Tripoli, and a second Libyan family has received an out-of-court settlement after filing cases related to MI6’s involvement in their kidnapping.
Since 2017, the judge known as the Commissioner of Investigative Authorities has been responsible for informing the government if intelligence officers are following the appropriate procedures, however; his report covering the period in which Abedi was allegedly tortured did not raise any serious concerns and did not mention these violations.
