A meeting with the victims of Britain's Libyan renditions

I am just back from Tripoli, where – amidst raucous celebrations about the end of war and dictatorship – I was part of a team investigating the cases of two families kidnapped by CIA and MI6 and sent to Gaddafi’s torture chambers.

The story goes like this: in February 2004, Abdelhakim Belhaj, a long-time Gaddafi opponent, tried to board a plane for Britain with his pregnant wife. The couple were denied boarding and hauled to Bangkok, where the CIA tortured them at a blacksite and flew them to Tripoli. Just a couple of weeks later, Sami al-Saadi (pictured right), Abdelhakim’s fellow Gaddafi opponent, was also caught trying to go to Europe and sent back to Tripoli from Hong Kong. His wife and four kids – the youngest only six – were with him.

Sami and Abdelhakim then spent years in Gaddafi’s torture chambers. Today they hold positions of respect in Libya – Belhaj heads Tripoli’s military council, and Sami is a regular public commentator on Libyan politics – but their families yearn for justice.

What sets these cases apart is the nature of the British role. Reprieve have acted in many cases where UK security services are in the picture – passing questions, interrogating, but always in a subordinate role to the US.  Here, the UK was a chief organizer in the rendition not just of two men, but of their families. The most shocking part is that we only know about them at all because the Libyan revolution shook loose documents that proved this.  This wasn’t just a smoking gun; it was a photograph of the gunman.

Sami’s eldest daughter Khadija (pictured right with her dad) tells a heart-rending story of the journey to Tripoli. She says she will never forget seeing her father strapped to the airline seat with an IV in his arm; at the time, she fainted from fright.  As a teenager, she penned anti-Gaddafi poems and read them out at school.  The family were forced to flee Tripoli when Gaddafi began attacking civilians and known opponents, and have only recently moved back into the family home.

Khadija, like Sami, says the thing she cares more about is truth: she wants the whole story told in the open, so that this never happens to any family again. She aspires to be a journalist herself – to bear witness to the new Libya and tell all the stories that were swept under the rug throughout her childhood.

We have promised her to tell her story as loudly, and as often, as we can. We have pledged to make both Britain and America confront what it put her through.

I hope you, too, will share her story with others.