By AFP
SYDNEY: An Australian held as a “high risk” inmate at Guantanamo Bay told Egyptian interrogators he planned to hijack a Qantas plane and trained some of the 9/11 attackers, a secret memo showed Monday.
Mamdouh Habib, who is suing Egypt’s former vice president and ex-leader Hosni Mubarak’s son for alleged torture, was under “extreme duress” when he made the claims, according to the memo released by the WikiLeaks website.
Guantanamo officials said Habib was suspected of being a “money courier and a terrorist operations facilitator” with links to the 9/11 hijackers and conspirators in the 1993 World Trade Centre bombing.
He was arrested in Pakistan following the September 11 attacks in New York and held for six months in Egypt under the CIA’s controversial “extraordinary rendition” program, where he made a series of sensational admissions.
“While in the custody of the Egyptian Government, under extreme duress,” Habib boasted that he trained six of the 9/11 plotters in martial arts and “was en route to hijack a Qantas flight,” his leaked prison file said.
A friend was going to conduct a simultaneous hijacking from Thailand, the file said, adding that Habib admitted having information “to be used to poison an unidentified river” in the US and had fought in Bosnia, Chechnya and Afghanistan.
Habib later retracted all the statements and told officials at the US detention site in Guantanamo Bay that he had been “lying” to the Egyptians.
The memo may lend weight to Habib’s claims that he was tortured by Egyptian authorities. He is seeking compensation over the allegations in a lawsuit against ex-vice president Omar Suleiman and Mubarak’s son Gamal.
Now 56, Habib was held in Guantanamo Bay for two-and-a-half years before being released in January 2005 without charge.
He won an out-of-court settlement with the Australian government over his treatment earlier this year, after a court ruled that he could sue.
The terms are confidential, but Canberra has indicated that it did not admit legal liability.
