The 'Tipton Three' go home - but now the questions start

JUST before midnight last Wednesday, Riasoth Ahmed received the telephone call that he had been waiting 25 months for. His son, Ruhal, was being released by the British intelligence services after 24 hours of detention following his return from Guantanamo Bay.

Ahmed and two of his closest friends, Asif Iqbal and Shafiq Rasul, were free men. They had travelled to Pakistan in the weeks following the September 11 terrorist attacks in America, but had been picked up by American special forces in Afghanistan and taken to Cuba, accused of fighting for the Taliban or al-Qaeda.

As they were reunited with their loved ones at a safe house on Thursday, they were no doubt hoping, as Ahmed said the previous day, to draw a line under the whole episode and move on.

But serious questions remain: why did the men, who all grew up and attended the same school together, fly out to Pakistan so soon after September 11? What were they doing in Afghanistan? And why did four men - another man, Munir Ali, has not been seen for more than two years - travel to the same area, independently, but within a few days of each other?

Along with two other men released last week, Tarek Dergoul, 26, from London, and Jamal al-Harith, from Manchester, the "Tipton Three" might be able to return to their homes free men, but their trial in the eyes of the British public has only just begun. All claim to have legitimate reasons for being abroad - to attend a wedding, to meet a prospective bride and to go on a computer course - but those theories will now be put to the test.

In Tipton, a run-down former manufacturing town in the West Midlands, Ahmed, 22, Rasul, 26, and Iqbal, 22, have become celebrity figures and the community is broadly split down white and Asian lines. The Muslim community, seeing the whole affair as a great miscarriage of justice, will welcome them back with open arms. Others remain more sceptical.

Dr Mohammed Naseem, chairman of Birmingham Central Mosque, said the treatment of the prisoners was "deplorable". "I think back to the times of Stalin and Hitler when people were being taken away somewhere where no one knew where they were. They were just disappearing and that is happening now."

Many locally fear the men’s return will reignite racial tensions in Tipton that have calmed in recent years. The area is one of the poorest in Britain and the issue has been seized upon by the British National Party. BNP support is growing and last year it won two council seats in neighbouring wards. Attacks on Muslims have increased and communities have closed inwards.

A bullet hole is still visible at a local Muslim association building, where spokesman Khurshid Ahmed said moderates were trying to combat any fundamentalist religious preaching in the area.

When the men were arrested and taken to Guantanamo Bay it was not hard to see how disaffected Asian youths in Tipton could be swayed by the anti-Western sentiment espoused by fundamentalist Muslim preachers. Unemployment, poverty and deprivation was rife, anti-British and American feeling was at an all time high and none had jobs with any long-term career prospects.

The BNP has predicted "major problems locally" and the police have stepped up foot patrols around the Park Lane estate as well as installing CCTV cameras outside each of the men’s family homes.

Ian Jones, a Labour councillor, has previously raised concerns about a mosque set up inside a house in Wellington Road - where Iqbal lives. He feared it was used to preach fundamentalism, claiming that it was "too much of a co-incidence that all three of these men attended the same prayer meetings and all lived within 250 yards of each other".

An effigy of a man wearing an orange boiler suit bearing the words "hang the Tipton Taliban" was strung up on a lamppost last week and locals report cars driven by "menacing-looking white men" making regular patrols around what is almost exclusively an Asian area.

What is certain is that it will be very hard for the three men to slip back into their previous lives.

Last week there were no signs of celebration, with the families refusing to come out of their houses.

Ruhal Ahmed, struggling with his English and clearly bewildered by the mass of cameras pointing at his front door every time it opened, said he was furious that, having held his son for more than two years in Cuba, the authorities also detained him for questioning on his return to Britain. "We are not terrorists," he said. "How do you think me and my family feel? My wife has been crying for the last 18 months."

As the first accounts of life in Guantanamo Bay were published, thoughts turned to the remaining four British detainees, who are now likely to face trial by American tribunal: Feroz Abbasi, 23, from Croydon; Moazzam Begg, 36, from Sparkhill, Birmingham; Martin Mubanga, 29, from north London; and Richard Belmar, 23, also from London.

In an interview with the Daily Mirror, one of the five men released, al-Harith, 37, said detainees were shackled up for 15 hours a day, regularly beaten and faced intense psychological pressure. He claimed they were held in wire cages open to the elements and forced to drink foul water and food that was out of date by up to 10 years.

He said: "The whole point of Guantanamo was to get you psychologically. The beatings were not nearly as bad as the psychological torture - bruises heal after a week - but the other stuff stays with you."

Al-Harith claimed devout Muslims were left traumatised after being forced to watch naked prostitutes, and that they were threatened with injections of drugs if they did not answer their interrogators’ questions.

The release of the five men by America was down to direct political involvement by the British government, even though Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, cast doubt on their innocence. He said: "Because... the police and Crown Prosecution Service judged that there is insufficient evidence to mount a prosecution on evidence that is admissible in the British court, it doesn’t follow from there that therefore the original detention was unjustified. Not a bit."

David Blunkett, the Home Secretary, said ministers were still in negotiations with their American counterparts regarding the remaining four. The government won’t press for their release because they are deemed more of a security risk, having been captured inside the "combat zone" in Afghanistan.

Abandoning their normal policy of refusing to comment on allegations against detainees, the Americans, who claim the men trained at al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan, studying terrorist skills including bomb-making, assassination and urban warfare, said they were convinced that if freed all four would pose "a serious threat" to America and Britain.

Tony Blair has agreed with the British security services that, in line with the American evidence, they were "more comfortable not having these people walking the streets in the UK", a statement that was met with anger and ridicule in equal measure by the men’s families and their lawyers.

However, Blunkett said he would press to ensure that the Britons receive a fair hearing. He said: "The evidence that has been picked up is best used in the US, not in Britain, because the people who evaluated that evidence are those who were present and have been involved with the interrogation process.

"We have spelt out the process that we have adopted and the requirements that we have built in for an appeal and legal representation. We’re still in the process of discussion."

That is not enough for Begg’s father Azmat, who has been the most vocal campaigner of any of the detainees’ relatives. Yesterday he returned home from America where he spent time trying to secure his son’s release and has delivered a letter to the White House asking President Bush to return Moazzam for trial in a British court. In it, Begg, 65, said his son had been working as an aid worker in Afghanistan, teaching and digging wells for villages.

He wrote: "Mr President, I do not plead for mercy, my son has not been charged with any crime. I ask for justice. Before mercy comes justice, and my son has been denied justice. Before the law you and I stand equal but in Guantanamo Bay my son is helpless and powerless to prove his innocence." As he handed the letter in, Begg said: "We are not against Americans or the English, we are human."

His pleas are unlikely to cut any ice as President Bush has already designated Abbasi, a former worshipper at Finsbury Park mosque, and Begg, who worked in an Islamic bookshop in Sparkhill, to be among the first to stand trial before military tribunals.

Five might be free but the story of the British detainees at Guantanamo Bay is a long way from being over.