Briton In Pakistan Torture Claim

BBC News

March 1, 2006

A British man who spent eight months in a Pakistani jail says he was tortured and abused by the authorities there.

Londoner Zeeshan Siddiqui, 26, told the BBC he was hooded, shackled and taken for questioning last May by armed men, without knowing what he was accused of.

He said over 11 days he was force-fed through tubes and injected with drugs. He was eventually accused of holding a fake ID card, but was cleared in court.

The Pakistani authorities have so far been unavailable to comment.

'Surrounded'

Mr Siddiqui, who was a student at the School of Oriental and African Studies (Soas) in London, went to Pakistan in February 2003 to study Arabic and Islamic law.

He said he was picked up by the Pakistani authorities on 15 May last year in the north-western city of Peshawar.

"I was surrounded by 20 people armed with Kalashnikovs pointed at my head - they were just screaming and shouting at me," he told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme.

He said his interrogators threatened to pull his fingernails out, "slit his flesh" and put him up on meat hooks.

"They were trying to force me to make a false confession - which I couldn't do."

They denied him access to a lawyer and tried to make him confess to being a member of al-Qaeda, he said.

British interrogation

On 26 May, after being tortured in two different locations, Mr Siddiqui said he was transferred to a regular prison.

On several occasions he claimed officers from British intelligence questioned him - asking about his views on Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq and other international conflicts.


They also asked him about people they believed he knew - including Shehzad Tanweer, one of the 7 July London bombers.

"I definitely did not know Shehzad Tanweer. I had never met him in my life," Mr Siddiqui said.

He admitted to knowing Asif Hanif, a Londoner who killed himself in a suicide attack on a pub in Israel, but said they had lost touch with each other once they left school.

"How am I supposed to know, six years in advance, what is going through someone's head?" he added.

The Foreign Office confirmed Mr Siddiqui was visited by consular staff and "other officials", but would not say who the officials were.

It said all allegations of mistreatment were taken very seriously, and Mr Siddiqui's case had been raised with the authorities in Pakistan several times.

A judge acquitted Mr Siddiqui in December of charges that he violated his visa and impersonated someone else, and he was deported to the UK.

Interview:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/4761682.stm