Former PM denies his government paid compensation to British jihadi who died in Iraq and says Mail campaigned for his release

Tony Blair has denied that a Labour government paid compensation to the former Guantánamo Bay detainee who went on to blow himself up in Iraq, with a strongly worded statement in which he accused the Daily Mail of hypocritical coverage over the Manchester-born jihadi’s death.

The former prime minister said compensation, estimated to be in six figures, was paid out under the Conservative-led coalition government in 2010 and criticised the tabloid for blaming him and Labour instead.

“He was not paid compensation by my government,” Blair said. “The compensation was agreed in 2010 by the Conservative government.”

On Wednesday morning, the Daily Mail’s front-page story was the death of Jamal al-Harith – who changed his name from Ronald Fiddler after converting to Islam in his 20s but most recently went by the nom de guerre Abu Zakariya al-Britani – in which Blair’s government was singled out for “intense lobbying” for his release.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Tony Blair: Harith’s release followed a campaign led by the Daily Mail, ‘the very paper that is now supposedly so outraged at his release’. Photograph: Victoria Jones/PA

Blair hit out at the Daily Mail’s “utter hypocrisy”, pointing out that the newspaper led a media campaign for Harith’s release from Guantánamo Bay.

“It is correct that Jamal al-Harith was released from Guantánamo Bay at the request of the British government in 2004,” he said. “This followed a massive media and parliamentary campaign, led by the Daily Mail, the very paper that is now supposedly so outraged at his release, and strongly supported by the then Conservative opposition.”

Manchester-born Harith was paid compensation by the UK government after his release from the US-operated military prison. In 2014, 10 years after returning to the UK, he left for Syria to join Isis. Compensation was awarded after Harith claimed British agents knew he was being mistreated during the time he was held without charge at Guantánamo.

A statement released on Wednesday on behalf of Harith’s wife, Shukee Begum, denied that he had received £1m in compensation from the British government as had been reported and said she believed this figure was for a “group settlement including costs for four innocent people including Jamal”.



The statement said that she had not received official confirmation of Harith’s death, but had been “desperately worried about his fate” since last hearing from him in 2014. Before 2001 Harith was a “peaceful and gentle person” who would not have become involved with Islamic State, her representative wrote.

“Whatever he may or may not have done since then … he was utterly changed” by his experiences in Guantánamo, the statement said. “While sleeping he would cry out, ‘Don’t hurt me,’” the family’s representative wrote.

Blair singled out a headline from the Mail Online entitled, “Still think he wasn’t a danger, Mr Blair? Fury at Labour government’s £1m compensation for innocent Brit.”

“The Mail headline shortly after he was released after months of their campaigning was, ‘Freedom at last for Guantánamo Britons’. They then quoted with approval various human rights activists saying, ‘Clearly, by what’s happened they’re not bad guys, they are entirely innocent’,” he said.



Harith, 50, is said by Islamic State to have carried out the suicide attack on coalition forces near Mosul on Monday.



The Daily Mail headline highlighted by Tony Blair. Photograph: Daily Mail

He is believed to have died on Monday in a small village, named Abu Saif, around three miles south of Mosul Airport, a senior Iraqi government source confirmed. The village was seen by Isis as a gateway to the airport, which Iraqi forces intend to use as a launching pad for the operation to retake the western half of Mosul. Iraqi officials say no troops or civilians were killed or wounded in the attack.

Blair, who was prime minister from 1997 to 2007, said: “The fact is that this was always a very difficult situation where any government would have to balance proper concern for civil liberties with desire to protect our security, and we were likely to be attacked whatever course we took. The reason it did take a long time for their release was precisely the anxiety over their true affiliations.”



He added: “Those who demanded their release should not be allowed to get away with now telling us that it is a scandal that it happened.”

Jack Straw, the former Labour home secretary, said it was not only the left and civil liberties groups that were calling for the release of detainees from Guantánamo Bay in the early 2000s, but that the Daily Mail and others on the right were very outspoken too.

“At the time the Daily Mail was demanding their release. It is very convenient for journalists and commentators and for the public to flip on this ... [but] we had to make the best decision at the time, which I think we did.”

But Straw admitted that although it was a Tory government that agreed the compensation deal in 2010, he accepted that a Labour government may have taken the same decision.

“The difficulty at that time was that there was no mechanism by which the evidence against these people who were suing the British government for complicity could be taken into court without the risk of us disclosing really sensitive intelligence which could, in turn, literally have led to the death of British agents,” he said.

Responding to Blair and Straw, a Mail spokesman said it was “utterly wrong to accuse the Daily Mail newspaper of inaccuracy over the Ronald Fiddler story”. But it accepted that the title’s sister organisation Mail Online “did publish a misleading headline which said that Mr Blair’s government was responsible” for the payout to Fidler. The headline had been removed and corrected, the Mail added.

The spokesman went on to reject Blair’s accusations: “However, to accuse the Daily Mail newspaper of hypocrisy in this case is monstrous. The Mail has been utterly consistent in its condemnation of Guantánamo Bay, arguing that extraordinary rendition, torture, and locking up people and holding them for years on end without trial was morally wrong. All of this happened under Tony Blair’s regime – as did the release of Ronald Fiddler, with the then home secretary’s assurance that the detainee’s return would not ‘be a threat to the security of the British people’”.

It said it had accurately reported that the decision to pay compensation was made by the coalition government “to avoid an embarrassing court battle which would have revealed the Blair government’s complicity in rendition and torture. The fact remains that the actions which led to this payment were all the responsibility of Tony Blair.”

Manchester to Iraq via Guantànamo: how Jamal al-Harith became Isis’s latest suicide bomber Read more

Earlier, a former counter-terrorism strategist said British authorities must accept some responsibility for failing to sufficiently monitor Harith before he left the UK to join Isis.



Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Arthur Snell, former head of the Prevent programme, the UK government’s counter-terrorism strategy, said it was clear there was a problem with Harith that was not adequately dealt with.

“It’s obvious that collectively the authorities – and obviously I have some personal responsibility there – we failed to be aware of what Fiddler was up to,” he said.

Harith was taken to Guantánamo Bay after being found in a prison in Afghanistan early in 2002, where he had been placed after being intercepted by the Taliban, who believed him to be a British spy. According to his sister, Maxine Fiddler, he initially believed the Americans to be his “saviours”.

However, they imprisoned him after coming to the conclusion that he had tried to join the Islamic fundamentalist group. He was finally released in 2004 after lobbying by the then home secretary, David Blunkett, who said that none of the people whose release from Guantánamo he had secured would “actually be a threat to the security of the British people”.

Lord Carlile, the former independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, told the Today programme he believed Harith was paid off to avoid disclosing sensitive national security material in court.



“It should have never been paid on the merits,” he said. “There was absolutely no merit in paying him a penny because plainly he was a terrorist and he was a potentially dangerous terrorist.

“The issue was the legal disclosure rules. If somebody brings a civil action for damages then they are entitled to disclosure, some of which may be national security material. In my view, the UK government and its legal advisers were absolutely right not to disclose to an enemy of the state clear national security material. But there is an issue as to why the UK paid money but not the US, which has much stricter rules about the disclosure of national security materials.”

A decade after his release, and despite his high profile, Harith was able to travel to Syria, one of about 850 individuals of national security concern who have travelled to join the conflict, according to figures published by the government last year. Of those, fewer than half have returned to the UK and about 15% are dead.

Harith’s wife told Channel 4 News the following year that she had pursued him to Syria with her children in a failed attempt to persuade him to come home.

The Foreign and Commonwealth Office said: “The UK has advised for some time against all travel to Syria, and against all travel to large parts of Iraq. As all UK consular services are suspended in Syria and greatly limited in Iraq, it is extremely difficult to confirm the whereabouts and status of British nationals in these areas.”



After Guantánamo: what became of the Britons freed from the US camp? Read more

Timeline: Jamal al-Harith

1966 – Born Ronald Fiddler in Manchester, England, to parents who had migrated from Jamaica.



1994 – Converts to Islam and officially changes his name to Jamal Udeen al-Harith.

Harith travels to Pakistan, reportedly for a backpacking trip. While there, he pays a truck driver to take him to Iran. At the Afghan border, Taliban guards, seeing his British passport, arrest him on suspicion of being a British spy.

US troops discover Harith in a Taliban jail in Kandahar and release him. The Red Cross is in the process of making arrangements for his return to Britain when American forces become suspicious about the purpose of his travels. He is arrested as a suspected enemy combatant and transported to Guantánamo Bay.

2004 – Harith is among five British citizens released and repatriated to the UK without charges.

Harith, with three other British former Guantánamo Bay detainees, sues the then US secretary of defence, Donald Rumsfeld, claiming they were subjected to illegal interrogation tactics, including torture and religious abuse.

2009 – After going through several levels of hearings, the US supreme court declines to accept the case for hearing on appeal.

2014 – Harith travels to Syria to join Isis.

2015 – His wife and their five children join him for some months before fleeing from the Isis-controlled territory. She tells reporters she left to persuade him to return.

2017 – According to reports, Harith is killed when he carries out a suicide car bombing at an Iraqi army base south-west of Mosul.