A highly-explosive row erupted in Britain Wednesday over allegations that British agents could have been involved in the torture of a Guantanamo detainee, and that the US government put pressure on courts in Britain not to release the relevant evidence, dpa reported.
Conservative member of parliament David Davis, describing the matter as one of "utmost national importance," urged the Labour government to clarify allegations made in the case of Binyam Mohamed, an Ethiopian who lived in Britain prior to his arrest in 2002.
Mohamed, who was held in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Morocco, was reported to have told his interrogators that the questions he was asked during investigations could only have been based on information supplied by British intelligence, thereby implying that Britain was part of the whole allegation of torture.
Davis also called on the government to address an alleged US threat to withdraw intelligence-sharing with Britain if details of the Mohamed case were released.
His intervention in parliament came shortly after two High Court judges Wednesday released what Davis described as an "astonishing ruling" in which they accused the US authorities over their suppression of evidence of allegations of torture in the case.
The British government has always denied complicity on the torture of detainees at Guantanamo and also rejected all charges in connection with so-called rendition flights.
But the judges revealed Wednesday that they refrained from publishing sensitive sections of a judgement last summer, because the US had threatened to withdraw cooperation over intelligence and warned that the British public would be "put at risk" by placing the information in the public domain.
In a technical ruling Wednesday, the judges again declined to publish the relevant passages, but also levelled serious allegations at the US.
In a joint statement, Lord Justice Thomas and Justice Lloyd Jones said: "Indeed, we did not consider that a democracy governed by the rule of law would expect a court in another democracy to suppress a summary of the evidence contained in reports by its own officials ... relevant to allegations of torture and cruel, inhumane, or degrading treatment, politically embarrassing though it might be.
"We had no reason ... to anticipate there would be made a threat of the gravity of the kind made by the United States Government that it would reconsider its intelligence-sharing relationship, when all the considerations in relation to open justice pointed to us providing a limited but important summary of the reports."
In another part of the ruling, the judges said they had been informed by lawyers for Foreign Secretary David Miliband that the threat to withdraw cooperation remained even under President Barack Obama's new administration.