Beatings, sex abuse and torture: how MI5 left me to rot in US jail

In the first eyewitness account to come out of the infamous Bagram prison, Londoner Richard Belmar talks exclusively to David Rose

Sunday February 27, 2005
The Observer

The security service MI5 [the equivalent of the CIA] turned down a recommendation by American intelligence that it try to recruit a British prisoner as an agent in the war against terror and instead consigned him to three years' detention in Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, an Observer investigation has revealed.

The Briton, Richard Belmar, 25, who returned from the American camp at Guantanamo, Cuba last month, said in an exclusive interview that his skull was later broken with a rifle butt and that he was tortured by the strappado method of being hung by his wrists from handcuffs. He said he was a witness to the death of another prisoner which the US has officially classed as murder.