Extradition Of Terror Suspects Founders
Al-Qaeda Suspects Remain in Britain Years After Arrests

By Craig Whitlock
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, December 21, 2008

SOUTH LITTLETON, England -- Soon after al-Qaeda bombed two U.S. embassies in East Africa in 1998, a U.S. federal judge issued a warrant for Khalid al-Fawwaz, an accused conspirator in the attacks and a confidant of Osama bin Laden.

British police promptly arrested Fawwaz, a Saudi national, at his home in London. Two other al-Qaeda suspects were later detained nearby. British authorities pledged to extradite the men to the United States as swiftly as possible so they could stand trial.

But a decade later, none of the defendants has moved any closer to a U.S. courtroom. One died of cancer in July. The other two, including Fawwaz, remain in prison here as their hearings drag on.

As the long-delayed British extraditions show, it is extraordinarily difficult to bring international terrorism suspects to justice by prosecuting them in U.S. civilian courts. The cases underscore the challenge facing President-elect Barack Obama as he tries to find a way to close the Navy prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and end the military tribunals set up by the Bush administration to handle terrorism cases from abroad.

Britain and other allies have long complained about Guantanamo, the tribunals and extralegal U.S. tactics used to fight al-Qaeda. At the same time, however, they have often blocked or resisted efforts by the U.S. government to prosecute accused terrorists in federal court.

Fawwaz and the others are among half a dozen accused terrorists whom the U.S. government has been seeking for years to extradite from Britain. Despite British approval of a "fast-track" extradition law in 2003 and a new treaty with the United States, the defendants have thwarted every attempt to deport them, aided by a British bureaucracy in no hurry to move the cases along.

"When we follow the letter of the law, it's not good enough for them. I think they're just trying to thumb their nose at us," said Daniel J. Coleman, a retired FBI agent who investigated the 1998 embassy bombings and pushed for Fawwaz's arrest. "They view us as the Belgian Congo. It's insulting to the United States. Our justice system is better than theirs."

Other allies have also been reluctant to extradite terrorism suspects for trial in the United States, sometimes letting them go free instead.

In December 2005, Germany freed convicted terrorist Mohammed Ali Hammadi, who had hijacked a TWA flight in Europe in 1985 and was serving a life sentence. Instead of deporting him to the United States, where he had been indicted for murdering a U.S. Navy diver during the hijacking, Germany allowed him to return to his native Lebanon, which does not have an extradition treaty with Washington. U.S. officials filed a diplomatic protest in Berlin and are offering a $5 million reward for Hammadi's arrest.

In Yemen, the government has refused to extradite three al-Qaeda members indicted in the United States, including two men charged in the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000. Yemen says it cannot extradite the men because they are Yemeni citizens. But it has also refused to keep them locked up, ignoring $5 million rewards posted by the U.S. State Department for their capture.

Since the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackings, the United States has managed to extradite a handful of minor terrorist figures. Oussama Kassir, accused of running terrorist Web sites and other crimes, was extradited from the Czech Republic in September 2007. Wesam al-Delaema, charged with trying to kill Americans in Iraq, was extradited from the Netherlands in January 2007. But most al-Qaeda leaders in U.S. custody have been apprehended overseas by the CIA, in secret operations designed to avoid judicial oversight.

Obstacles to extradition have loomed especially large in Britain, where al-Qaeda suspects have exploited a cumbersome legal process and a slow-moving bureaucracy to stave off deportation.

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."

In February 1998, Fawwaz faxed a bin Laden fatwa to the al-Quds newsroom. The fatwa, or religious order, announced that al-Qaeda had declared war against "Crusaders and Jews" and that it was the duty of all Muslims to attack Americans and their allies around the world.

Fawwaz knew the statement would cause trouble and appeared shaken by the threat of violence, Atwan said. "He said, 'I disagree with this fatwa, but I have to go through with it,' " Atwan said.

U.S. officials, however, said Fawwaz's media work served as a cover for other activities. According to the U.S. indictment against Fawwaz, the London office played a key role in recruiting "military trainees" for al-Qaeda, served as a communications hub and gave logistical support to terrorist cells in Africa and Afghanistan.

Among other items, Fawwaz supplied bin Laden with a satellite phone that he used to keep in touch with operatives worldwide. According to U.S. officials, who intercepted many of the calls, bin Laden used the phone to contact Fawwaz and other associates in London more than 200 times.

"Fawwaz is a very close friend of bin Laden, a very, very close friend," said Coleman, the retired FBI agent. "He's a very committed guy who was playing on the edge. He was out there in the open playing a dangerous game, and he got caught."

On Aug. 7, 1998, al-Qaeda suicide bombers attacked the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing more than 200 people. A few weeks later, the FBI developed leads connecting Fawwaz to the plot. Worried that he might try to flee Britain, Coleman said he woke up a U.S. judge at 3 a.m. to sign an international warrant for Fawwaz's arrest.

British police complied and told their American counterparts that they hoped Fawwaz would be extradited within three months, Coleman said. But it soon became clear that the case would take much longer.

Challenges and Delays

Fawwaz contested his extradition before a series of British courts, losing at each turn but appealing as far as he could go. His luck appeared to run out in December 2001, when the House of Lords, acting as Britain's appellate court of last resort, ruled that the British government had the authority to deport him.

The Lords also ruled that the government could extradite Abdel Bary and Ibrahim Eidarous, two Egyptians who worked closely with Fawwaz in London. Their fingerprints were discovered on a fax sent to news organizations asserting that al-Qaeda was responsible for the embassy bombings.

The British government, however, waited more than six years to act on the ruling as it weighed further challenges from defense lawyers and counterarguments from the U.S. government. Finally, on March 12 this year, British Home Secretary Jacqui Smith issued an order that Fawwaz and Abdel Bary be surrendered to U.S. officials (Eidarous died of leukemia in July while under house arrest in London).

Still, the extraditions are unlikely to happen anytime soon. Fawwaz and Abdel Bary have asked a judge to review the decision. An initial hearing is scheduled for February.

The Home Office's extradition section did not respond to a query seeking an explanation for the delays. A spokeswoman for the Home Office, speaking on the condition of anonymity according to government policy, said: "The case has been contested at all stages. It took considerable time to deal fairly and properly with all aspects of the representations."

In 2005, after British journalists inquired about Fawwaz's status, the Home Office issued a written statement saying that "the overall process has taken longer than was ever anticipated." The statement also implicitly blamed Washington for the delay, noting that U.S. officials had taken two years to respond to one key British request for information.

The U.S. Justice Department declined a request to interview officials about the case. In a written response to questions, Dean Boyd, a spokesman for the department's national security division, said the U.S. government "has been vigorously pursuing" the extradition of Fawwaz and Abdel Bary and "will continue to use all available means" to bring them to trial.

Akhtar Raja, a London-based attorney for Fawwaz, declined to comment. Fawwaz and Abdel Bary did not respond to letters sent to them in prison.

A 'Cumbersome' System

Other governments have complained about Britain's lengthy extradition proceedings. French officials are still bitter about the 10 years it took for Britain to extradite Rachid Ramda, an Algerian later convicted of financing deadly bomb attacks on the Paris Metro system in 1995.

After the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington, the British government acknowledged the problems and pledged to fix them. In a 2003 interview with The Washington Post, then-Home Secretary David Blunkett called his country's laws "outdated and arcane."

"There's no good in having a good extradition arrangement with another country if your own internal process is so cumbersome and slow you can't actually implement it," he said. That year, Britain negotiated a new extradition treaty with the United States and later approved a new law designed to "fast track" extraditions to several countries.

Progress, however, has been slow. The new treaty was not approved by the U.S. Senate until 2006 and did not go into effect until last year. "The whole thing is a mess," said Geoff Gilbert, a law professor at the University of Essex.

Meanwhile, British defense lawyers have come up with new strategies. They have argued that conditions in U.S. "supermax" prisons, where many convicted terrorists are held, violate the European Convention on Human Rights. They have also argued that holding a trial in federal court in New York would be unfair, because jurors in the region would be prejudiced by the attacks on the World Trade Center.

Other common objections: that evidence against the defendants was obtained by torturing other suspects; that the United States could send the men to Guantanamo or a military brig instead of prosecuting them in civilian courts; and that once on U.S. soil they could be rendered to another country by the CIA.

U.S. officials have denied the torture accusations. They have also promised in writing that the suspects will be tried only in federal court and will not get the death penalty.

But British defense lawyers, as well as some lawmakers, have argued that the U.S. government cannot be trusted to keep its word. In July, a House of Commons committee issued a report saying that the British government could no longer accept assurances from Washington that it does not practice torture. If such a policy is implemented, human rights laws could prevent Britain from extraditing any suspects to the United States.

"We can't blindly keep going on, saying, 'Our ally is our ally,' " said Peirce, the attorney for Abdel Bary. "America may be our most trusted ally, but we have a duty to look at what's been done in the name of the law in the war on terror."

Staff researcher Julie Tate in Washington contributed to this report.