A legal attempt to prosecute the former senior MI6 officer Sir Mark Allen for his alleged role in the rendition and torture of Libyan dissidents may be heard partially in secret.

The decision by the director of public prosecutions (DPP), Alison Saunders, not to charge Allen is being challenged at the high court by lawyers for Abdel Hakim Belhaj and his wife, Fatima Boudchar, who was pregnant when they were both abducted in 2004.

The unusual procedure is being heard by the lord chief justice, Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd, and Mr Justice Popplewell. The court has not yet determined whether it is involved in a criminal or civil case.



Belhaj and another Libyan dissident Sami al-Saadi, who was also abducted in east Asia, were flown back by the CIA to Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya. Belhaj and Saadi claim they were frequently tortured. Their wives and children were forcibly returned to Libya along with them.

Evidence of MI6 involvement in their ordeal emerged in correspondence with Allen found inside the abandoned office of Moussa Koussa, Gaddafi’s foreign minister and former intelligence chief, after the regime fell in 2011.

Last June, after a four-year investigation by Scotland Yard that gathered 28,000 pages of evidence, the Crown Prosecution Service announced that it did not believe there were sufficient grounds for charging Allen, who had been head of counter-terrorism at MI6.



Lawyers for human rights organisation Reprieve, on behalf of the Libyan victims, are challenging the DPP’s decision.



During the high court hearing, it emerged that the DPP had asked the Foreign and Commonwealth Office to intervene and seek a secret hearing – a “closed material procedure” – so sensitive security evidence can be seen by the judges but not the claimants.



Confidential CPS files relating to the case, the court was told, have been passed to the FCO so it can assess what should be allowed into the public domain. The FCO was Allen’s former employer.



Ben Jaffey QC, representing Belhaj and his wife, told the court Allen had sought “political authority for some but not for all of his actions”; he only disclosed some of what occurred “to his political masters”.



Rendition operations, Jaffey said, amount to misconduct in public office. A further hearing is due next month. Belhaj’s lawyers fear the proceedings will be repeatedly delayed by years of legal appeals and objections.



Commenting on the hearing, Cori Crider, a lawyer for rendition victims at Reprieve, said: “When top MI6 officials and a former foreign secretary are investigated for rendition and torture, you’d think prosecutors would sup with a very long spoon.

“How are victims meant to have confidence in open, British justice when prosecutors ask the very department involved in the case to help them make an application for a secret trial?”

Allen has always denied any wrongdoing.



The FCO is also being sued for the same events in a civil claim, where Belhaj and Boudchar are seeking an apology and a token £1 in damages.