A Briton who claims to have been tortured in Bangladesh with the complicity of MI5 agents said Thursday he was accused of organising the 2005 London suicide bombings, and threatened with rape. Jamil Rahman, who says he faced repeated beatings by Bangladeshi agents over more than two years, claimed Bangladesh agents tried to force him to say he was an al Qaeda militant behind the July 7 attacks.
"They stripped me naked and said that if I didn't say what they wanted me to say, they would rape me and my wife and burn her and other family members," he told the BBC. "They told me to say I was al Qaeda and the organiser of the 7/7 bombings" which killed 56, added Rahman, who is taking legal action against Britain's Home Office over the alleged abuse.
Rahman says he was arrested in 2005 by police in Bangladesh, where he had settled after marrying a Bangladeshi woman. Over three weeks of interrogation, he agreed to make taped confessions to terrorist offences. After his release, he was frequently summoned for fresh interrogations by security service MI5 and Bangladeshi officials over the next two years, he told the Guardian newspaper last month.
In the new BBC interview, Rahman said MI5 appeared to be the driving force behind his mistreatment in Bangladesh. "It was all to do with the British. Even the Bengali intelligence officer told me that they didn't know anything about me, that they were only doing this for the British," he told the broadcaster. The Home Office denied the allegations. "We firmly reject any suggestion that we torture people or ask others to do so on our behalf. Mr Rahman has made a lot of unsubstantiated allegations. "They have not been evidenced in any court of law," said a spokesman.
The claims come after British police said in March they would investigate claims that MI5 was complicit in the torture of former Guantanamo Bay detainee Binyam Mohamed in Pakistan. Mohamed became the first prisoner to be released from the US-run Guantanamo Bay detention camp under President Barack Obama in February and has kept a low profile since returning to Britain.