UK resident alleges Blair and Straw knew he was being tortured, but says: ‘I don’t believe the court will solve this problem’

The last British resident held at Guantánamo Bay has said he does not want to see anyone prosecuted over his imprisonment and alleged torture at the US military prison in Cuba.

In his first interview since returning home to London in October after being detained without charge for 14 years, Shaker Aamer suggested to the Mail on Sunday that Tony Blair and Jack Straw were aware that he was being tortured while they were in office.

“I do not want to prosecute anybody,” Aamer told the BBC in a later interview. “I do not want anybody to be asked about what his role [was] in the past. I just want people to tell the truth.” He added: “I don’t believe the court will solve this problem. I don’t believe the court will bring justice because of what happened in the past.”

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Alex Salmond, the former first minister of Scotland, told BBC One’s The Andrew Marr Show that “as with so many other things” Blair and Straw had a great deal to answer for. “They have to be asked the straight question of how could they possibly not have known about the fate that had befallen a British citizen,” he said.

Responding to Salmond’s comments, Straw said: “The British government was never complicit nor condoned torture or other ill-treatment of detainees wherever they were held.

“I spent a large part of my time as foreign secretary making strong representations to the US government to get British detainees out of Guantánamo Bay and the US government’s ill-treatment and torture of detainees remains a terrible stain on its record.”

Straw said that the only reference made to Aamer in the Gibson inquiry, which looked at allegations that the UK intelligence services were complicit in the torture of detainees, was in relation to representations made by Straw and David Miliband, who also served as foreign secretary, to get him out of Guantánamo.

Not all of Sir Peter Gibson’s interim report has been made public. His inquiry was shelved by the government and is now being completed in secret by Westminster’s intelligence and security committee.

A spokesperson for Blair said: “Tony Blair has always been opposed to the use of torture, has always said so publicly and privately, has never condoned its use and thinks it is totally unacceptable. He believes the fight against radical Islamism is a fight about values and acting contrary to those values, as in the use of torture, is therefore not just wrong but counterproductive.”

In his interview with the Mail on Sunday, Aamer alleged that he had about 200 interrogations during the 14 years that he was held. He claimed to have been tortured using methods including sleep deprivation and being shackled to the floor in sub-zero temperatures.

He alleged that his head was banged against a wall at the US Bagram airbase in Afghanistan where he was first held and that a British intelligence officer was present at the time the “enhanced interrogation technique”, which had not been approved by the UK, was carried out.

In a later interview with the BBC’s Victoria Derbyshire show, Aamer said the British intelligence officer who witnessed his mistreatment did not participate, but did not attempt to bring it to an end. This man had previously introduced himself as a British intelligence officer and had given his name as John. “So I have no doubt he was an Englishman,” Aamer said, “the way he spoke to me, the questions he asked.”

Dominic Grieve, chair of the intelligence and security committee, said he hoped Aamer and other British former detainees would feel able to give evidence to his inquiry into UK involvement in torture.

Asked about the allegations that Straw and Blair would have known about the treatment of detainees at Guantánamo, Grieve said: “These are serious allegations and they are to be taken seriously and they are some of the issues that the intelligence and security committee will be asked to look into.”

Asked if he would call Straw and Blair to give evidence, Grieve said: “We will go where the evidence takes us ... all such things are possible, I want to make that quite clear.”