UK police to investigate spy over torture claim

LONDON — Britain’s foreign intelligence agency MI6 reported one of its officers to authorities amid new concerns over the country’s possible complicity in torture, prompting police to launch an investigation Friday, officials said.

MI6 referred an incident to the government’s chief legal adviser, Patricia Scotland, who ruled police should carry out an inquiry, Foreign Secretary David Miliband said.

The case involves one MI6 officer and was the second investigation to be launched in recent months involving the treatment of detainees. Police were already investigating domestic spy agency MI5 over allegations that an officer was complicit in the mistreatment of a former Guantanamo Bay detainee.

Police said in a statement that it was investigating “the conditions under which a non-Briton was held and the potential involvement of British personnel.”

Miliband said MI6’s decision was “unprompted by any accusation against the service or the individual concerned.”

Opposition Conservative lawmaker William Hague wrote to Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Miliband to ask them to consider allegations made by a parliamentary committee that MI6 and MI5 may have been complicit in the torture of detainees in Pakistan, Egypt and Guantanamo Bay.

But police and the Foreign Office would not provide further details of the new complaint being investigated, or specify where and when the alleged mistreatment was said to have taken place.

“The government wholeheartedly condemns torture. We will not condone it. Neither will we ever ask others to do it on our behalf,” Miliband said in a letter to Hague published Friday. “This is not mere rhetoric but a principled stance consistent with our unequivocal commitment to human rights.”

Police confirmed that the complaint is not connected to an inquiry launched in July into the alleged torture of ex-Guantanamo Bay detainee Binyam Mohamed.

Mohamed — an Ethiopian who moved to Britain as a teenager — claims he was tortured in Pakistan and Morocco after he was arrested in 2002, and that British intelligence officers were aware of his mistreatment.

Released from Guantanamo Bay without charge, Mohamed alleges that British intelligence officials supplied questions to his interrogators.

MI5 has said it did not know Mohamed was being tortured, or held in Morocco, but has acknowledged it should have done more to seek reassurances about his whereabouts and treatment.

Britain’s opposition Liberal Democrat lawmaker Edward Davey urged the government to disclose some limited details of the new inquiry. “We also need to know what has suddenly prompted this apparent outbreak of conscience at MI6,” he said.

In a first ever interview last month, outgoing MI6 chief John Scarlett denied that his officers tortured terror suspects or colluded with countries that use torture.

Seven former detainees have sued the government, accusing the security services of “aiding and abetting” their extraordinary rendition, unlawful imprisonment or torture. Five other men say they will also launch similar claims.

Miliband has previously told lawmakers that some attempts to gather intelligence from detainees held overseas have been halted for fear they may be abused.

But, in a letter to the Foreign Affairs Select Committee in July, he acknowledged that Britain cannot always guarantee how detainees are treated by other countries.

“When detainees are in our custody, we can be sure of how they are treated … when they are not, we cannot have the same degree of assurance,” he wrote in July.