Extradition Of Terror Suspects Founders

Bombings at the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi, above, and the embassy in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, led to the arrest of three suspects in Britain a decade ago. Two are still in prison there; one died this year. (By Dave Caulkin -- Associated Press)

So far, Britain has handed over only one terrorism suspect to the United States: Syed Hashmi, 28, a U.S. citizen charged with helping to supply gear to al-Qaeda camps in Pakistan. He was transferred to U.S. custody in May 2007 and is being held in solitary confinement in a New York prison. His trial is pending.

Six other defendants, arrested in Britain between 1998 and 2006, are still waiting. Although the British government has made preliminary decisions to extradite all of them, officials are still responding to legal challenges asserting that suspects' human rights would be violated if they are sent to the United States. British officials did not sign papers ordering the surrender and extradition of Fawwaz, the Saudi citizen, until March 12 -- 9 1/2 years after he was arrested.

Meanwhile, defense lawyers have filed a succession of appeals that will further stretch out the proceedings in that case and the others, probably for years.

Gareth Peirce is an attorney for Adel Abdel Bary, an Egyptian national who was indicted in U.S. federal court in 1999 for the embassy bombings, and Babar Ahmad, a British citizen charged with sponsoring terrorist Web sites. She said her clients would prefer to remain behind bars in Britain indefinitely, without trial, than defend themselves in a U.S. court.

"They anticipate if they are extradited to America, they will be convicted and locked up for the rest of their lives in utterly grotesque conditions," Peirce said. "Even though they are innocent, they don't believe they could be acquitted in an American court."

At the end of a public footpath and across from the Holborn Boarding Kennels here in the village of South Littleton, in central England, sits Her Majesty's Prison Long Lartin. Critics have dubbed it "Longtanamo," a miniature British version of Guantanamo.

Four of the six terrorism suspects awaiting extradition to the United States are detained in a high-security wing at Long Lartin. None has been charged with a crime in Britain. All have existed in a legal limbo for years, largely forgotten by the public.

"They've almost disappeared off the radar screen," said Moazzam Begg, a former Guantanamo inmate who now works for Cageprisoners, a British advocacy group for Muslims detained on terrorism offenses. "I don't know if even they know what's going to happen to them, or if there will be any closure to their case."

An Office in London

In 1994, Osama bin Laden decided he needed better publicity for his nascent terrorist organization. He set up a satellite office in London and picked a fellow Saudi, Khalid al-Fawwaz, to run it. The office, known as the Advice and Reformation Committee, served as a public relations arm for al-Qaeda, issuing communiques that blasted the Saudi royal family and other enemies. It was a small-budget affair and for years was based in Fawwaz's house in the Dollis Hill neighborhood of northwest London.

An overweight man who spoke poor English and wore traditional Saudi robes, Fawwaz was an unorthodox media spokesman. But he persuaded several journalists to travel to Afghanistan to interview bin Laden in the mid-1990s, before the al-Qaeda leader was considered a global threat.

Among them was Abdel Bari Atwan, the editor of al-Quds al-Arabi, a respected Arabic-language newspaper based in London. He said Fawwaz was a "genuine" fellow but seemed out of his depth.

"He wasn't really sophisticated, and he didn't feel as if he belonged to our time. He wasn't very Westernized," Atwan recalled. "You could see him being in Afghanistan or Tora Bora or Saudi Arabia, but not in London."