UK to pay ‘substantial sum’ to Palestinian Guantanamo detainee over torture claims

The British government has agreed to pay a “substantial sum” to settle a lawsuit by a Guantanamo Bay detainee who said UK intelligence agencies were complicit in his torture at secret US interrogation sites, his lawyer said Monday.

Abu Zubaydah, a Palestinian man born and raised in Saudi Arabia, was thought to be a high-ranking member of al-Qaeda, the terrorist group that carried out the September 11, 2001, terror attacks, when he was captured in Pakistan in 2002.

Zubaydah, whose real name is Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn, was tortured at so-called CIA “black sites” in third countries such as Poland and Lithuania before being transferred to the US prison at Guantanamo Bay in 2006. He has since been held without trial.

Helen Duffy, an attorney, said the confidential settlement was symbolically and practically significant for the “intolerable suffering” Abu Zubaydah endured.

She urged the UK to press for the immediate release of Abu Zubaydah and others held without charge more than 20 years after the terror attacks. As of January 2025, Abu Zubaydah was one of four so-called “forever prisoners” at Guantanamo, whom the US will not release but also cannot put on trial.

“This case is deeply relevant today, as some states ride roughshod over international law, and the world looks to others to respond,” Duffy said. “There are critical lessons about the cost of cooperating with the US or other allies flouting international norms. It is more important than ever that human rights and states’ international obligations are respected, and violations are met with reparation and accountability.”

The UK Foreign Office declined to comment, saying it would neither confirm nor deny intelligence matters.

Abu Zubaydah was the first person in the CIA’s detention and interrogation program following the September 11 attacks, and was subjected to so-called “enhanced interrogation,” which is now widely viewed as torture. He says he was held at CIA black sites in Thailand, Poland, Morocco, Lithuania and Afghanistan.

He was waterboarded 83 times and suffered other physical abuse, according to a US Senate report, which said the CIA conceded he was never a member of al-Qaeda and not involved in planning the 9/11 attacks.

He was once left isolated for 47 days without questioning. At one point, he was confined for over 11 days in a coffin-sized box, among a raft of other mistreatment, a US Senate report found. While in the box, Duffy said, he was “left to marinate in his own urine and feces.”

UK security and intelligence services were aware Abu Zubaydah was being tortured, but they continued to provide questions for the CIA to ask him without seeking assurances of his condition, a parliamentary committee found in 2018.

Dominic Grieve, a lawyer and former member of the House of Commons who chaired the parliamentary inquiry into detainee abuse, said the payout was very unusual but that Abu Zubaydah was clearly wronged.

“Americans were behaving in a way that should have given us cause for real concern,” Grieve told the BBC. “We should have raised it with the United States and, if necessary, closed down cooperation, but we failed to do that for a considerable period of time.”

In 2022, the US Supreme Court dismissed a lawsuit by Abu Zubaydah, who was seeking testimony from two former CIA contractors as part of an investigation into his treatment when he was held in Poland. The court rejected his case because the government said it would expose state secrets despite much of the information having been widely reported.

But in 2023, Britain’s Supreme Court ruled that he could use English law in a legal claim against the UK government over alleged complicity in the torture.