UK Lawyer Says Spain Complicit In Guantanamo Abuse

LONDON (Reuters) - Spanish authorities were complicit in the secret U.S. transfer of two British residents to Guantanamo Bay and took part in their interrogation there, a lawyer for the two men said on Wednesday.

Edward Fitzgerald said Spain had facilitated the ordeal of the two men, Jamil el-Banna and Omar Deghayes, who were freed last month after suffering what he called years of "intensive interrogation and torture" in the U.S. prison camp on Cuba.

"The central point we will be making is that the Spanish authorities are clearly implicated in the ordeal of the past five years," Fitzgerald told a London court which is considering a Spanish request to extradite the pair from Britain to face terrorism charges.

He said Spain had acquiesced in the secret U.S. transfer of the two men through its airspace from Afghanistan to Guantanamo.

Spanish authorities not only provided U.S. authorities with material about which to question the two men, but sent their own investigators to take part in interrogations, the lawyer said.

He demanded to know whether Spain had sought the men's extradition while they were in Guantanamo, and said it was unjust that authorities were now seeking to question them on the same allegations from which U.S. authorities had cleared them.

"We do submit this is an overwhelming case of an abuse of power and an abuse of process," Fitzgerald told the court.

ADJOURNMENT

David Perry, representing the Spanish authorities, said Spain wants to prosecute the pair as alleged members of an al Qaeda cell there.

Both strongly deny the charge of belonging to a terrorist organization, which carries a maximum sentence of 15 years. Judge Timothy Workman adjourned the case until February 14.

The case reignites sensitive questions over alleged complicity between European governments and U.S. authorities over secret CIA transfers of terrorist suspects, known as renditions.

European governments have widely condemned detention without trial in Guantanamo and called for its closure. But revelations that some of them sent their own intelligence officers to question suspects there have caused controversy in several countries, including France and Germany.

El-Banna, a Jordanian who has five British children, was arrested in Gambia, west Africa in 2002 and transferred by the United States first to Afghanistan and then to Guantanamo.

Deghayes, a Libyan, married in Afghanistan in 2001 and, according to a supporters' Web site, fled the country with his wife and baby son after the U.S. invasion that year and was arrested in Pakistan on his way back to Britain.

He lost the sight of one eye after U.S. guards assaulted him with pepper spray in Guantanamo, according to the legal charity Reprieve which represents him.