Post by Abu 'Ata on Apr 13, 2006 1:52:14 GMT -5
'People were begging for mercy'
Four years ago, three British men were jailed in Egypt for being members of a banned political party. Last month they walked free - after what they describe as years of horrific torture. They talk to Owen Bowcott
Owen Bowcott
Tuesday April 11, 2006
www.guardian.co.uk/egypt/story/0,,1751289,00.html
Guardian
To stave off madness, Maajid Nawaz organised daily races between two pebbles flicked haphazardly across the floor of his solitary confinement cell. By night, he studied the stars through a skylight in the roof of his Egyptian prison. He had no lights, no toilet and no sheets. For months he talked to himself; his only other constant companions were ****roaches.
Under interrogation, along with two other Britons, he was forced to listen to the screams of inmates as they were tortured. One colleague, Reza Pankhurst, had electric shocks administered to him. Another, Ian Nisbet, was beaten. All were forced to sign confessions that they say were fictitious.
Their introduction to the Egyptian penal system started with a jarring awakening in the early hours of April Fool's Day 2002, as state security officers bearing machine guns burst into their homes to arrest them. Four weeks ago, they were released. They have returned to Britain with a unique insight into the relationship between the United Kingdom and one of its closest allies in the Middle East.
All three are now considering suing the Egyptian government through the British courts for the torture and physical mistreatment they say they endured. They also want to publicise what is happening inside Egypt's crowded jails - notoriously oppressive regimes where the intellectual framework of al-Qaida's violent ideology was first formulated. The UK, meanwhile, is pressing ahead - as it is with other countries - to draw up a memorandum of understanding with the Egyptian government to facilitate the return of failed asylum-seekers, the key requirement of which is a credible assurance that they will not be mistreated.
The three Britons are Muslims and members of the Islamist party Hizb-ut-Tahrir, which is not illegal in Britain at present, though the Home Office is considering banning it. But in Egypt it is a banned organisation, and their membership was enough to see them sentenced to five years in prison for conducting propaganda "by speech and writing" on its behalf.
Throughout the men's detention the Egyptian government denied they were being mistreated and said that medical examinations had shown no signs of torture. Egyptian officials insisted the men had been convicted in open court and said that Hizb-ut-Tahrir is outlawed in every Middle Eastern country because it seeks the overthrow of established and democratically elected regimes. In October 2002, at the beginning of their trial, the Egyptian embassy in London said: "These men have been visited twice a week by the British consul. There's no bad treatment."
Reunited with their wives and young children in London, the three men are trying to make sense of their experiences. In a cafe close to the Euston Road, Maajid Nawaz, 28, recounts his time inside. "I was born and raised in Essex," he says. "I come from an immigrant family but I know no other nationality apart from British. I worked my way through the education system and was treated as though I had value."
Nawaz studied law and Arabic at the School of African and Oriental Studies (SOAS), part of London University, and set out for Alexandria University with his wife and young baby for the third year of his course in September 2001, he says, to improve his language skills. He arrived on September 10. "One day later the world changed around me."
"On the Alexandria University campus there was a mosque I attended. We were used to freedom of speech. I thought it would be good to talk to these guys. They asked about Muslims in Britain. I suspect the state security service had people in the universities. I was a carefree student." He had been a member of Hizb ut-Tahrir since his early 20s. It was 2.30am on April 1 when the security forces came to arrest him. "The officers had machine guns and hand grenades. They ripped out the telephone. They wanted to make my wife feel stranded in Egypt." He was blindfolded and driven to El Gehaz, the State Security Investigation (SSI) unit offices in Cairo.
"The moment we walked into the building, the screams began. You could hear people being abused and beaten, people begging for mercy. We were given numbers. They try to dehumanise you. I was 42. I was on the floor in a corridor. If you took your blindfold off, they beat you. They are scared you will identify them later as torturers."
His hands were tied behind his back, he says, making it impossible to sleep. "We had to stand up and answer a roll call every hour. We were sleep-deprived. It was torture. If you failed to stand up they beat you. Eventually they took me to an interrogation cell. The man was throwing chairs across the room and shouting his head off. I tensed my stomach muscles because I thought he was going to hit me.
"Instead he put an electrical device near my face. I could hear crackling. I could hear Reza scream as he was given shocks. They said they would do the same thing to me. They targeted him because he spoke better Arabic.
"They asked questions about Hizb-ut-Tahrir. That was the first time I knew why I had been arrested. They asked me who I knew in Britain and about people they wanted. They mentioned Abu Hamza [the Egyptian-born preacher who was recently jailed in London for inciting murder and race hatred] and Yasser al-Siri [an Egyptian dissident]. They said we were not going home until they got them. They wanted to do a swap. I had never heard of these people. Then the interrogators asked how I knew Ian and Reza."
Nawaz had shared a flat in east London with Pankhurst, who was then at King's College. He knew Nisbet from Hizb-ut-Tahrir meetings. "Luckily they chose not to shock me. I don't know how I would have reacted."
By this stage - 11 days after their arrest - the British consul had intervened and they were moved to Mazra'a Tora prison outside Cairo, where political detainees are customarily held.
Ian Nisbet, now 31 and a website designer by profession, had converted to Islam at Westminster University. "I became interested in seeking a solution for world injustices when I was about 16," he says now, "after listening to rap music which mentioned racism, police abuse and political matters. I dabbled with capitalist, socialist and nationalist ideas but all left me unimpressed. I was raised as a Christian, but felt uncertain about a lot of its doctrines.
"I discovered Islam from people distributing leaflets at my university. They talked about politics, economics and social rules in an Islamic state. They were supporters of Hizb-ut-Tahrir. I became convinced of Islam when I was shown that belief in a creator is a rationally proven certainty and not a mere faith." He had travelled to Egypt, he says, because he wanted to study Arabic so that he could read Islamic texts first-hand. "When I finally had the opportunity to travel to Egypt, I jumped at the chance."
His experience of being arrested was similar to Nawaz's. He was seized from a house in Cairo where he lived with his wife Humeira and their son. "I was blindfolded and put in a cold cell - the air-conditioning was full on. I remained there for four days," he says. "I was woken every hour and made to stand and say my number - 26. My hands were cuffed behind my back. I could not sleep on the concrete and felt very frightened. I could hear numbers being called out followed by screams. After two days I was pulled into an office where I was interrogated. I was beaten, my wife and child were threatened, I was humiliated. When I couldn't understand a question, they became more aggressive, threatening me with electrocution. They took me to witness another prisoner being given electric shocks.
"They said they knew everything and just wanted me to agree with their pre-prepared report. I found having the other person tortured in front of me very distressing."
On the fourth evening, he says, he was taken to the prosecutor's office, where his blindfold was removed. "The prosecutor read from the torturer's report, asking the same questions. I was forced to sign the pages. I still had not seen a lawyer nor a British government representative despite my requests."
Reza Pankhurst, who is half Iranian, had moved to Egypt in late 2000 to be near his mother, who had settled there with her husband. An IT consultant, he set up a web development office in Cairo, where he was taken immediately after being arrested. "I was held at gunpoint - with the gun held at my head - while I opened the office," he recalls. "They searched and removed all the computers ... None were included as evidence and they were never returned."
He, too, was interrogated for four days. "I was blindfolded and handcuffed. Sometimes I was permitted to sit and other times I was forced to stand. Among the intimidation used were verbal threats to my life, to my wife [and] the threat of sexual assault. Once they smashed a glass next to my feet. During these interrogations I was beaten, had pressure applied to various parts of my body, was stripped and given electric shocks numerous times." It would be 11 days before the three men were allowed to meet a UK consular officer; the bruises on Pankhurst's face were still visible.
In Mazra'a Tora all three were held in the solitary punishment block. Conditions were gruelling: the cells had no water or toilets and they slept on concrete floors. "The world we knew seemed so far away," Nawaz says. "You talk to yourself to stop going mad." After five months, following diplomatic pressure from the British embassy, they were allowed to share a cell, integrate with other prisoners and keep personal possessions.
Osama bin Laden's deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, is an Egyptian surgeon whose ideologically formative years were spent incarcerated in one of his country's prisons following the assassination of President Anwar Sadat in 1981. Zawahiri was repeatedly beaten and tortured in prison, according to his biographers; his traumatic experiences during three years in jail are believed to have transformed him from a relative moderate in the Islamist underground into a violent extremist. "Torture is counterproductive," Nawaz says. "It produces the opposite of the results intended."
When Nisbet arrived at the prison, he says, only some of the prisoners had actually been sentenced; the rest were interned without trial. "All had been severely beaten and tortured with electricity for an average of about 45 days after initial arrest. Some [told him they had been] stabbed, raped or had acid poured over them. Most had been suspended by their bound wrists behind their back from the top of a door which left them incapable of using their hands for a long time."
When the men were first taken to Mazra'a Tora, the veteran human rights activist Professor Saad Ibrahim was also an inmate. The US cut off $83m worth of foreign aid to Egypt in protest at his continued imprisonment. When they left, Ayman Noor, the runner-up in the last general election, had also been imprisoned there.
"While we were there, prisoners were beaten, stripped and had water thrown over them in the middle of winter," says Pankhurst. "Others were beaten by guards until their ribs broke. We ourselves were threatened with death. [One official] indicated he could arrange for some of the criminal prisoners to kill us. The courts and prisons in Egypt reflect the oppressive and violent nature of the dictatorial Mubarak regime."
The three men's trial eventually began in autumn 2002 in Court 19 of Cairo's supreme court. The charges involved conducting propaganda by "speech and writing" on behalf of Hizb-ut-Tahrir. After innumerable delays they were found guilty and sentenced to five years in prison.
Throughout their four-year imprisonment, Amnesty International supported the three Britons and said they had been subjected to "deeply unfair trials". On their release in early March the organisation declared: "We were extremely concerned that these men were tortured into making false confessions." It has called for the Egyptians convicted alongside them to be freed. The three men men say they were examined so long after they had been tortured that there were no visible signs of mistreatment left.
Amnesty International says of Egypt: "Torture is used systematically in detention centres throughout the country. During 2004 several people died in custody in circumstances suggesting torture may have caused their deaths."
The UK government's proposal to outlaw Hizb-ut-Tahrir is still under consideration. The party, founded in 1953, seeks to remove what it considers the "tyrannies" that rule most Muslim states and replace them with caliphates subject to Islamic laws. It says it is opposed to violence and does not aim to change British society.
Nawaz is now determined to practise as a lawyer. "I want to continue my legal studies to help people in those jails. My first-hand experience is that memorandums of understanding don't work. They are not legally binding.
"We saw people in our jail who had been returned from Sweden under similar agreements but had nevertheless been tortured."
Pankhurst's mother, Zara, lives in Cairo and campaigned tirelessly to support the three men. She visited them regularly and repeatedly lobbied the UK embassy. "I remember at the beginning, the natural reaction was, 'Why me?' Then I met so many nice people in prison and a lot of them had done nothing at all," she says.
"Later, after I had met all these people, I said, 'What is the difference between me and them?' Some of them have been ordered by a judge to be released a hundred times but are still there. I wish they would open the door and let them go".
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006
Four years ago, three British men were jailed in Egypt for being members of a banned political party. Last month they walked free - after what they describe as years of horrific torture. They talk to Owen Bowcott
Owen Bowcott
Tuesday April 11, 2006
www.guardian.co.uk/egypt/story/0,,1751289,00.html
Guardian
To stave off madness, Maajid Nawaz organised daily races between two pebbles flicked haphazardly across the floor of his solitary confinement cell. By night, he studied the stars through a skylight in the roof of his Egyptian prison. He had no lights, no toilet and no sheets. For months he talked to himself; his only other constant companions were ****roaches.
Under interrogation, along with two other Britons, he was forced to listen to the screams of inmates as they were tortured. One colleague, Reza Pankhurst, had electric shocks administered to him. Another, Ian Nisbet, was beaten. All were forced to sign confessions that they say were fictitious.
Their introduction to the Egyptian penal system started with a jarring awakening in the early hours of April Fool's Day 2002, as state security officers bearing machine guns burst into their homes to arrest them. Four weeks ago, they were released. They have returned to Britain with a unique insight into the relationship between the United Kingdom and one of its closest allies in the Middle East.
All three are now considering suing the Egyptian government through the British courts for the torture and physical mistreatment they say they endured. They also want to publicise what is happening inside Egypt's crowded jails - notoriously oppressive regimes where the intellectual framework of al-Qaida's violent ideology was first formulated. The UK, meanwhile, is pressing ahead - as it is with other countries - to draw up a memorandum of understanding with the Egyptian government to facilitate the return of failed asylum-seekers, the key requirement of which is a credible assurance that they will not be mistreated.
The three Britons are Muslims and members of the Islamist party Hizb-ut-Tahrir, which is not illegal in Britain at present, though the Home Office is considering banning it. But in Egypt it is a banned organisation, and their membership was enough to see them sentenced to five years in prison for conducting propaganda "by speech and writing" on its behalf.
Throughout the men's detention the Egyptian government denied they were being mistreated and said that medical examinations had shown no signs of torture. Egyptian officials insisted the men had been convicted in open court and said that Hizb-ut-Tahrir is outlawed in every Middle Eastern country because it seeks the overthrow of established and democratically elected regimes. In October 2002, at the beginning of their trial, the Egyptian embassy in London said: "These men have been visited twice a week by the British consul. There's no bad treatment."
Reunited with their wives and young children in London, the three men are trying to make sense of their experiences. In a cafe close to the Euston Road, Maajid Nawaz, 28, recounts his time inside. "I was born and raised in Essex," he says. "I come from an immigrant family but I know no other nationality apart from British. I worked my way through the education system and was treated as though I had value."
Nawaz studied law and Arabic at the School of African and Oriental Studies (SOAS), part of London University, and set out for Alexandria University with his wife and young baby for the third year of his course in September 2001, he says, to improve his language skills. He arrived on September 10. "One day later the world changed around me."
"On the Alexandria University campus there was a mosque I attended. We were used to freedom of speech. I thought it would be good to talk to these guys. They asked about Muslims in Britain. I suspect the state security service had people in the universities. I was a carefree student." He had been a member of Hizb ut-Tahrir since his early 20s. It was 2.30am on April 1 when the security forces came to arrest him. "The officers had machine guns and hand grenades. They ripped out the telephone. They wanted to make my wife feel stranded in Egypt." He was blindfolded and driven to El Gehaz, the State Security Investigation (SSI) unit offices in Cairo.
"The moment we walked into the building, the screams began. You could hear people being abused and beaten, people begging for mercy. We were given numbers. They try to dehumanise you. I was 42. I was on the floor in a corridor. If you took your blindfold off, they beat you. They are scared you will identify them later as torturers."
His hands were tied behind his back, he says, making it impossible to sleep. "We had to stand up and answer a roll call every hour. We were sleep-deprived. It was torture. If you failed to stand up they beat you. Eventually they took me to an interrogation cell. The man was throwing chairs across the room and shouting his head off. I tensed my stomach muscles because I thought he was going to hit me.
"Instead he put an electrical device near my face. I could hear crackling. I could hear Reza scream as he was given shocks. They said they would do the same thing to me. They targeted him because he spoke better Arabic.
"They asked questions about Hizb-ut-Tahrir. That was the first time I knew why I had been arrested. They asked me who I knew in Britain and about people they wanted. They mentioned Abu Hamza [the Egyptian-born preacher who was recently jailed in London for inciting murder and race hatred] and Yasser al-Siri [an Egyptian dissident]. They said we were not going home until they got them. They wanted to do a swap. I had never heard of these people. Then the interrogators asked how I knew Ian and Reza."
Nawaz had shared a flat in east London with Pankhurst, who was then at King's College. He knew Nisbet from Hizb-ut-Tahrir meetings. "Luckily they chose not to shock me. I don't know how I would have reacted."
By this stage - 11 days after their arrest - the British consul had intervened and they were moved to Mazra'a Tora prison outside Cairo, where political detainees are customarily held.
Ian Nisbet, now 31 and a website designer by profession, had converted to Islam at Westminster University. "I became interested in seeking a solution for world injustices when I was about 16," he says now, "after listening to rap music which mentioned racism, police abuse and political matters. I dabbled with capitalist, socialist and nationalist ideas but all left me unimpressed. I was raised as a Christian, but felt uncertain about a lot of its doctrines.
"I discovered Islam from people distributing leaflets at my university. They talked about politics, economics and social rules in an Islamic state. They were supporters of Hizb-ut-Tahrir. I became convinced of Islam when I was shown that belief in a creator is a rationally proven certainty and not a mere faith." He had travelled to Egypt, he says, because he wanted to study Arabic so that he could read Islamic texts first-hand. "When I finally had the opportunity to travel to Egypt, I jumped at the chance."
His experience of being arrested was similar to Nawaz's. He was seized from a house in Cairo where he lived with his wife Humeira and their son. "I was blindfolded and put in a cold cell - the air-conditioning was full on. I remained there for four days," he says. "I was woken every hour and made to stand and say my number - 26. My hands were cuffed behind my back. I could not sleep on the concrete and felt very frightened. I could hear numbers being called out followed by screams. After two days I was pulled into an office where I was interrogated. I was beaten, my wife and child were threatened, I was humiliated. When I couldn't understand a question, they became more aggressive, threatening me with electrocution. They took me to witness another prisoner being given electric shocks.
"They said they knew everything and just wanted me to agree with their pre-prepared report. I found having the other person tortured in front of me very distressing."
On the fourth evening, he says, he was taken to the prosecutor's office, where his blindfold was removed. "The prosecutor read from the torturer's report, asking the same questions. I was forced to sign the pages. I still had not seen a lawyer nor a British government representative despite my requests."
Reza Pankhurst, who is half Iranian, had moved to Egypt in late 2000 to be near his mother, who had settled there with her husband. An IT consultant, he set up a web development office in Cairo, where he was taken immediately after being arrested. "I was held at gunpoint - with the gun held at my head - while I opened the office," he recalls. "They searched and removed all the computers ... None were included as evidence and they were never returned."
He, too, was interrogated for four days. "I was blindfolded and handcuffed. Sometimes I was permitted to sit and other times I was forced to stand. Among the intimidation used were verbal threats to my life, to my wife [and] the threat of sexual assault. Once they smashed a glass next to my feet. During these interrogations I was beaten, had pressure applied to various parts of my body, was stripped and given electric shocks numerous times." It would be 11 days before the three men were allowed to meet a UK consular officer; the bruises on Pankhurst's face were still visible.
In Mazra'a Tora all three were held in the solitary punishment block. Conditions were gruelling: the cells had no water or toilets and they slept on concrete floors. "The world we knew seemed so far away," Nawaz says. "You talk to yourself to stop going mad." After five months, following diplomatic pressure from the British embassy, they were allowed to share a cell, integrate with other prisoners and keep personal possessions.
Osama bin Laden's deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, is an Egyptian surgeon whose ideologically formative years were spent incarcerated in one of his country's prisons following the assassination of President Anwar Sadat in 1981. Zawahiri was repeatedly beaten and tortured in prison, according to his biographers; his traumatic experiences during three years in jail are believed to have transformed him from a relative moderate in the Islamist underground into a violent extremist. "Torture is counterproductive," Nawaz says. "It produces the opposite of the results intended."
When Nisbet arrived at the prison, he says, only some of the prisoners had actually been sentenced; the rest were interned without trial. "All had been severely beaten and tortured with electricity for an average of about 45 days after initial arrest. Some [told him they had been] stabbed, raped or had acid poured over them. Most had been suspended by their bound wrists behind their back from the top of a door which left them incapable of using their hands for a long time."
When the men were first taken to Mazra'a Tora, the veteran human rights activist Professor Saad Ibrahim was also an inmate. The US cut off $83m worth of foreign aid to Egypt in protest at his continued imprisonment. When they left, Ayman Noor, the runner-up in the last general election, had also been imprisoned there.
"While we were there, prisoners were beaten, stripped and had water thrown over them in the middle of winter," says Pankhurst. "Others were beaten by guards until their ribs broke. We ourselves were threatened with death. [One official] indicated he could arrange for some of the criminal prisoners to kill us. The courts and prisons in Egypt reflect the oppressive and violent nature of the dictatorial Mubarak regime."
The three men's trial eventually began in autumn 2002 in Court 19 of Cairo's supreme court. The charges involved conducting propaganda by "speech and writing" on behalf of Hizb-ut-Tahrir. After innumerable delays they were found guilty and sentenced to five years in prison.
Throughout their four-year imprisonment, Amnesty International supported the three Britons and said they had been subjected to "deeply unfair trials". On their release in early March the organisation declared: "We were extremely concerned that these men were tortured into making false confessions." It has called for the Egyptians convicted alongside them to be freed. The three men men say they were examined so long after they had been tortured that there were no visible signs of mistreatment left.
Amnesty International says of Egypt: "Torture is used systematically in detention centres throughout the country. During 2004 several people died in custody in circumstances suggesting torture may have caused their deaths."
The UK government's proposal to outlaw Hizb-ut-Tahrir is still under consideration. The party, founded in 1953, seeks to remove what it considers the "tyrannies" that rule most Muslim states and replace them with caliphates subject to Islamic laws. It says it is opposed to violence and does not aim to change British society.
Nawaz is now determined to practise as a lawyer. "I want to continue my legal studies to help people in those jails. My first-hand experience is that memorandums of understanding don't work. They are not legally binding.
"We saw people in our jail who had been returned from Sweden under similar agreements but had nevertheless been tortured."
Pankhurst's mother, Zara, lives in Cairo and campaigned tirelessly to support the three men. She visited them regularly and repeatedly lobbied the UK embassy. "I remember at the beginning, the natural reaction was, 'Why me?' Then I met so many nice people in prison and a lot of them had done nothing at all," she says.
"Later, after I had met all these people, I said, 'What is the difference between me and them?' Some of them have been ordered by a judge to be released a hundred times but are still there. I wish they would open the door and let them go".
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006