British officials are travelling to Guantanamo Bay today to visit Binyam Mohamed and make preparations for the detainee's expected release, the Foreign Office said. The team, who left Miami airport en route to the US prison camp on Cuba, include a doctor who will assess Mohamed's condition.Legal representatives of the Ethiopian-born detainee, who has refugee status in the UK, hope he will be cleared for release and return to Britain within days under a review ordered by the US president, Barack Obama.
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Mohamed's lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, said today he was "very hopeful" that his client would be back in the UK by the middle of next week. No official confirmation of a release date had yet been given, but Mohamed was first in the list of detainees being considered by the review, he said.
If he is cleared for release, it is expected that a British government plane would be sent to Guantanamo to bring him back to Britain. Stafford Smith said: "The doctor is going there because obviously it makes no sense for a British plane to show up in Guantanamo to pick him up and then a doctor to say he is not fit to fly."
It is not clear whether Mohamed is still on hunger strike. One of his legal team visited him two days ago to try to persuade him to end the strike so that he could be sure of being fit to fly, Stafford Smith said.
Obama issued an executive order on 22 January establishing a review of all those held at Guantanamo. Announcing plans on Wednesday for the visit by UK officials, the foreign secretary, David Miliband, stressed that Mohamed's return to Britain was dependent on the outcome of the review process, but said the US administration had agreed to treat his case as a "priority".
Mohamed, 30, came to Britain in 1994 and was granted asylum. He was arrested by American forces in Pakistan in 2002 on suspicion of involvement in terrorism.
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Mohamed has said that he falsely confessed to a radioactive "dirty bomb" plot while being tortured in Morocco, and has claimed that Britain was complicit in his rendition and torture. The torture allegations are at the heart of a continuing legal row after high court judges complained that Miliband had blocked them, for national security reasons, from making documents relating to his case public.
Meanwhile, a US military interrogator has claimed in an affidavit that Mohamed co-operated in a terror investigation after he was captured and insisted he never witnessed the prisoner being abused.
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