BRITAIN’S MI6 intelligence service is to be investigated over allegations that one of its agents tortured a non-British prisoner just weeks after the service’s head denied that it had any involvement in torture.
The Metropolitan Police investigation was ordered yesterday by the UK attorney general Baroness Scotland after MI6, which is officially known as the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), brought its own concerns about one of its own officers to her attention.
News of the inquiry – which will run parallel with a probe into similar allegations against MI6’s sister agency, MI5 – emerged in a letter from the foreign secretary David Miliband to Conservative front-bench spokesman William Hague.
“This case was referred to the attorney general by SIS on its own initiative, unprompted by any accusation against the service or the individual concerned,” Mr Miliband told Mr Hague in the letter, later released publicly.
MI5 is being investigated about the case of Binyam Mohamed, a 30-year-old Ethiopian-born British resident, who alleged that he was tortured by CIA interrogators after his 2002 arrest in Pakistan while he was being held in a secret detention centre in Morocco.
A MI5 officer questioned Mr Mohamed in Pakistan to discover if he had intelligence about UK terrorist plots, but further British questions were relayed to the CIA and put to him in Morocco and later in Guantánamo.
Since his release in February, Mr Mohamed, who moved to the UK when he was a teenager and who was never charged by the Americans, has been allowed a permit to stay in the UK.
Mohamed’s allegations of British involvement in torture prompted both MI5 and MI6 to check whether they had benefited from information about possible security threats gained under torture by the CIA. Following MI6’s own review, the service’s chief Sir John Scarlett – who played a key role in the preparation of the British case for war against Iraq in 2003 – brought his concerns to the attorney general.
