Blunkett criticises Guantanamo treatment

BRITISH detainees at Guantanamo Bay received a fresh boost yesterday when Home Secretary David Blunkett criticised their treatment by the American authorities.

Speaking as he prepared to fly to the US for terrorism talks, he pledged to fight for a "fair deal" for the four suspects whose release has not yet been secured.

Mr Blunkett will be in Washington at the same time as supporters of the Britons held at the Cuban military base take their campaign for justice to the White House.

Retired Birmingham bank manager Azmat Begg, whose son Moazzam is among the nine, is due to hand in a letter to US President George W Bush tomorrow.

Asked if he believed what had gone on at Guantanamo Bay was wrong, Mr Blunkett said: "Yes I do."

He continued: "I believe the system we have put in place is fair and open; people have a right to legal representation and to challenge the decisions taken.

"That is not the case in Guantanamo Bay and I shall be raising on the back of the arrangements for the five coming back the situation of the four who remain there.

"I would like to see them treated in the way we have treated those we believe are suspected of and have been involved in terrorism which is to give them a proper due process." Asked if that could best be done by returning them to Britain, Mr Blunkett said any evidence could be tested in a US court "in a way it is very hard for us to do".

Mr Blunkett said details of what the men had been doing when they were picked up during the conflict in Afghanistan in 2001 had been "obscured" by time and "the way evidence was collected".

He had to deal with "the threat they pose now", not what they did then, he added, but could not rule out action being taken against them if they were returned to Britain.

Mr Begg's Washington trip was the families' latest and most emotional attempt to secure the freedom of their loved ones. Mr Begg wept during a press conference in London last week as he described his last contact with his 36-year-old son.

Moazzam Begg, from Sparkhill, Birmingham, was arrested in Islamabad, Pakistan in February 2002.

He is a language teacher and law student who ran a religious and historical bookshop before moving to Afghanistan to do charity work, his family said.