UK pays "substantial sum" to Guantánamo detainee over torture claims

The British government has paid a “substantial sum” to a detainee held at the United States’ Guantánamo Bay prison to settle a lawsuit alleging UK complicity in his rendition and torture, the man’s legal team announced.

The settlement was reached out of court with Abu Zubaydah, whose lawyers accuse British intelligence services of providing questions to the CIA to be used during his interrogation while he was being tortured at a network of secret CIA “black sites” between 2002 and 2006. The amount paid has not been disclosed, and the UK government made no admission of liability as part of the agreement, The Guardian reports.

Abu Zubaydah, whose full name is Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn, is a stateless Palestinian who grew up in Saudi Arabia. Now 54, he has been held at Guantánamo Bay without charge since the early years of the US “war on terror,” making him one of the facility’s so-called “forever prisoners.” He was captured in Pakistan in March 2002, and while US authorities initially claimed he was a senior al-Qaida figure, they have since abandoned that assertion and no longer allege he was a member of the group.

Evidence of British involvement emerged in two UK parliamentary reports published in 2018, which found that MI5 and MI6 had passed questions to the CIA for use on Abu Zubaydah, despite knowing he was being subjected to torture. A US Senate investigation later detailed the scale of his abuse, stating that he was waterboarded 83 times in a single month, confined for days in a coffin-sized box, stripped naked, beaten, deprived of sleep for a week, and subjected to other forms of severe mistreatment.

“It is important, symbolically and practically, that UK pays for its role in our client’s torture,” said Helen Duffy, Abu Zubaydah’s international counsel. “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.”

The legal path to the settlement was cleared in December 2023, when the UK Supreme Court ruled that Abu Zubaydah could pursue a civil claim against the British government. The court rejected arguments that responsibility lay solely with the countries where he was detained, noting that the alleged wrongdoing was carried out by UK intelligence officials acting under the law of England and Wales.

The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office said it does not comment on intelligence matters. Duffy called on the government to acknowledge and apologise for its role, and to work actively toward Abu Zubaydah’s release, warning that the case highlights “the cost of cooperating with the US or other allies flouting international norms.”

By Vafa Guliyeva