Assignment: Torture Investigation

Available for over a year

How close is the special relationship between British and American security services? Have the British security services been complicit in the use of torture techniques used by the CIA to question terror suspects? Stephen Grey investigates for Assignment. The programme includes the first broadcast interview with a Pakistani citizen, Iqbal Madri, who claims he was arrested in Indonesia in 2002 and flown to the British Dependency of Diego Garcia, before being tortured in Egypt. Until February last year the British government had accepted US assurances that Diego Garcia had not been used for rendition flights. In a statement to the House of Commons, Foreign Secretary David Miliband announced last year that Washington had admitted that two rendition flights had passed through the island in 2002. Mr Madni's lawyers claim research has identified their client as a passenger on one of the two flights. They now plan to seek a judicial review of Britain's involvement in his case. Assignment also asks how much British intelligence officers knew about the rendition and alleged torture of Ethiopian-born British resident Binyam Mohamed, first arrested and interrogated in Pakistan, before being flown by the CIA to Morocco.