As political prisoners go free in post-Mubarak Egypt, Adel Abdel Bary, who sought asylum in the UK, still languishes in a UK jail
In post-Mubarak Egypt men like Abboud al-Zomor, the intelligence officer who supplied the bullets that killed President Anwar Sadat in 1981, are emerging from nearly 30 years in prison, to play key roles in the power struggle over the country's future. Thousands of political opponents were jailed by Sadat, and tens of thousands more after his assassination; opponents of the regime were hounded at home and abroad. This is the background to Hosni Mubarak's exit, and, in Cairo, a newly respectful view of his opponents.
But in Britain it is another story. A Cairo lawyer and prison veteran, Montasser el-Zayat, is preparing a request to the Egyptian lawyers' union to intervene on behalf of his former law partner, imprisoned here for 12 years without trial, in a case that shames British justice.
Adel Abdel Bary, a human rights lawyer who was for years one of Amnesty International's sources of information, was imprisoned and tortured for his political opposition; in 1993, he was given political asylum here. He was then arrested here in 1998, shortly after the al-Qaida attack on US embassies in east Africa. He was released after five days when the British police found there was no terrorism case to charge him with.
But he was rearrested in 1999 when his extradition was requested by the US on exactly the same "evidence" already dismissed in Britain. It had been sent by the UK to the US as part of the great fishing net of "intelligence" in the war on terror.Ever since, Abdel Bary has been kept in Belmarsh, Manchester, and Long Lartin prisons while his lawyers fought extradition. Successive secretaries of state spent six years coming to a decision to extradite him – from January 2002 to march 2008. His case is now in the European court of human rights, pending replies by the Britishgovernment to concerns about the severity of conditions in US supermax prisons and his facing life without parole. He has been apart from his wife and six children in London throughout the family events that mark life – his mother's death, his daughter's wedding, his boys becoming men. In all these years in prison, he has never been questioned.
Abdel Bary and many others were named as defendants in the terrorism case USA v Usama bin Laden et al. The US built the case on a February 1998 declaration of an "International Islamic Front for Jihad on the Jews and the Crusaders" by Osama Bin Laden's al-Qaida. Various individuals from other organisations signed it, including Ayman Zawahiri, then the head of Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ).
In the factionalised and secretive world of Egyptian opposition politics in the 80s and 90s, EIJ, which sought the overthrow of Mubarak's government, was composed of cells of professionals – doctors, engineers, soldiers and lawyers like Zawahiri and Abdel Bary. It was an organisation which predated al-Qaida, and members and ex-members denounced Zawahiri for his signature.
In London, Abdel Bary was focused only on his own country, and ran an organisation called International Office for the Defence of the Egyptian People. UK officials were aware of these political activities.
USA v Usama bin Laden – and Abdel Bary's extradition case – depended on the anonymous testimony of a man called "Confidential Source number 1" – the first al-Qaida informant, described as the Rosetta Stone by US investigators. But all these years later, the man is now known to be a Sudanese, Jamal al Fadl. He never met Abdel Bary, nor mentioned him in his evidence about the supposed organisational link between al-Qaida and EIJ. The US prosecutors used this to implicate automatically individual members or ex-members, without any proven link between the individuals concerned.
Al Fadl's new life in a witness protection programme in the US, with his family brought over from Sudan, has cost the US taxpayer millions of dollars, and used countless hours of the lives of the FBI minders who took care of him over several years and gave him the nickname "Junior" from his adolescent behaviour. There are serious questions about both the credibility of this sole witness, and the conduct of the prosecutors. Long after the initial case began, it emerged that 18 video-conferences between Al Fadl and New York prosecutors were taped, and lawyers maintain that they show Al Fadl being "moulded and manipulated".
The extradition case would put Abdel Bary on trial with a number of other defendants whose names were added along the years, charged with general conspiracy to kill Americans, and with substantive charges in the East African embassy bombing.
The one concrete thing Abdel Bary is on trial for is possession of a fax announcing the embassy bombings – found in his office weeks afterwards. Such faxes were being distributed freely in places like outside the Regent's Park mosque, in central London, at the time, but it, along with Al Fadl's testimony on EIJ's supposed al-Qaida links, was enough for the US to conclude that Abdel Bary was involved.
Earlier this month, the Obama administration went back on its decision to try the al-Qaida September 11conspirators in a federal court, opting instead for the discredited military commissions system within Guantánamo Bay. It is an admission of how the war on terror has defeated the US judicial system.
Britain's justice minister should now advise the British home secretary to refuse any more complicity with the mockery of justice involved in 12 years of flawed US extradition proceedings against Abdel Bary.