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In July 2001, he took an extended holiday to Pakistan, then Afghanistan for a prospective business opportunity. While there, Northern Alliance fighters sold him for bounty to Americans. Britain was complicit from the start.
Incarcerated at Bagram, UK representatives participated in interrogations, understood his situation, yet facilitated his transfer to Guantanamo. In March 2004, he was released, arrested on arrival in Britain, then let go without charge the next day. His experience traumatized him enough to remain silent for months. Finally he spoke publicly, explained his ordeal, and that he suffers from migraines, memory loss and depression.
Moazzam Begg - A British/Pakistani National
In July 2001, he moved to Kabul with his family to continue work on a girls school he helped fund. In October, they left for Islamabad, Pakistan for safety where, in January 2002, Pakistani intelligence and CIA agents abducted him, took him to Kandahar, then Bagram and Guantanamo. He was falsely called an enemy combatant and al-Qaeda member, charges he categorically denies.
During internment, he was kicked, beaten, suffocated with a bag over his head, stripped naked, chained by his hands to the top of a door, left hanging, and led to believe he'd be executed. Mostly in isolation, he was tortured, interrogated over 300 times, threatened with death, and witnessed the murder of two detainees.
After his 2005 release, he documented his experiences in two books: "Enemy Combatant: A British Muslim's Journey to Guantanamo and Back," and "Enemy Combatant: My Imprisonment at Guantanamo, Bagram, and Kandahar," explaining his experiences and Britain's complicity, saying:
"one of the hardest truths I've had to face since my return has been the complicity of my own government in what happened. For me the questions remain. Who provided false information to the US, and allowed my detention in the first place? Who exploited my situation to the maximum at every stage of my ordeal in Islamabad, in Kandahar, in Bagram, and in Guantanamo? Who was then, as now, the closest ally of the US? (Contrary to Foreign Office letters to his father, he) was interrogated by British intelligence in these very places - places where people, in the same situation as me, were tortured to death."
Zeeshan Siddiqui - A British Citizen
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