Prosecutors are set to announce that they are bringing no charges following a police investigation into MI6’s involvement in the kidnapping of two families who were “rendered” to the late Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi’s prisons, despite protests by the victims and their lawyers that the evidence against the agency is overwhelming.

Documents that described the UK’s involvement in the abduction of Abdel Hakim Belhaj and his pregnant wife, and fellow Libyan dissident Sami al-Saadi along with his wife and four young children, were uncovered during the 2011 revolution that led to the overthrow and murder of Gaddafi.



A decision by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) that no charges will be brought – despite the discovery of the documents and their apparently damning contents – may be announced as early as Thursday.

Scotland Yard officers who have spent four years building a case against the MI6 officers allegedly involved will be deeply dismayed by the decision.



So too will be Belhaj, Saadi and their families, who have said that they will regard any failure to bring charges as a damning indictment of British standards of justice.



However, the decision will be a relief to Sir Mark Allen, the former head of counter-terrorism at MI6. Allen was questioned by Scotland Yard detectives about faxes from London to Tripoli, which were signed by “Mark”, an MI6 officer who was acknowledging his role in the abduction of Belhaj.



It will be welcomed too by Jack Straw, who was foreign secretary at the time of the 2004 renditions, and so bore political responsibility for the operations. It is understood that Straw was questioned by detectives as a potential witness.

Straw and Allen have always denied wrongdoing.



Belhaj, a leading member of the Islamist opposition to Gaddafi, was abducted by the CIA in Thailand in March 2004 while en route from Malaysia to London. The letter from Mark at MI6 was sent later, reminding the Libyan government that the tip-off that enabled the CIA to apprehend Belhaj and fly him to Tripoli had come from MI6.



Belhaj’s wife later described how she was taped to a stretcher for the 17-hour flight. She spent four months in prison; her husband was detained for more than six years, and says he was repeatedly tortured.



Later that month Saadi, his wife and four children were detained in Hong Kong, having travelled there thinking they were to be given a chance to talk to British diplomats about seeking asylum in the UK. Members of the family later told how they were detained for two-and-a-half months. Saadi was detained for six years and also alleges he was tortured.



In between the two rendition operations, Tony Blair flew to Libya, holding a meeting in the desert with Gaddafi, and later stating that the two countries had found “common cause” in counter-terrorism initiatives. Lawyers for the kidnap victims say that this visit placed the renditions in a wider context of Anglo-Libyan political rapprochement, trade deals and multimillion-pound energy contracts.



Both men say they were interrogated by British intelligence officers while in Libyan custody, and there have been allegations that the information extracted from them was used to detain Libyan dissidents living in the UK. That allegation appears to have been accepted in recent court decisions.



Saadi and his family have received £2.2m in damages from the British government. Belhaj is holding out for a formal apology to his wife.



Sources familiar with the decision-making process at the CPS say a conclusion was reached some weeks ago that no charges were likely to be brought. It is thought that government lawyers had been closely examining the difficulty of bringing charges – and court proceedings – against the UK’s intelligence agencies.



A decision not to bring charges will halt, at least for the time being, Scotland Yard’s investigations into the UK’s involvement in the so-called extraordinary rendition programme that was vastly expanded by the CIA in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.



British detectives had previously investigated the UK’s role in the mistreatment of Binyam Mohamed, a British resident and al-Qaida suspect, and in the abuses that occurred in the US detention facility at Bagram, north of Kabul. Mohamed was subsequently awarded damages by the British government.

A judge-led inquiry into the abuses had been shelved in December 2013 on the grounds that it could not run in parallel with the police investigations. The judge who led the inquiry, Sir Peter Gibson, published an interim report in which he said there was evidence that the UK’s intelligence agencies had been involved in rendition operations, and that some of their officers had “supported” the mistreatment of suspects: assaults, sleep deprivation, hooding and the use of stress positions. His report also listed 27 questions that he had been unable to get answers to before his inquiry had been scrapped.

Westminster’s secretive Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) is currently investigating the UK’s alleged involvement in rendition and detainee abuse. The ISC is expected to find answers to those 27 questions, and investigate the UK’s involvement in the abduction of Belhaj, Saadi and their families.



There was no immediate comment from Belhaj, Saadi or their lawyers, or from the CPS. Straw and Allen have repeatedly refused to offer comment beyond denying wrongdoing.