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British ISIS fighter who blew himself up was paid compensation by UK government

WorldBritish ISIS fighter who blew himself up was paid compensation by UK government

British terrorist Ronald Fiddler was born to Jamaican parents in 1965 and raised in Moss Side-Manchester. This week, the so-called website designer, with a new non-de-guerre Abu Zakariya al-Britani, exploded a car bomb at an army base near Mosul, killing an unknown number of Shia Muslims.

Sometime in the 1990s, Fiddler turned to Islam and went by the name Jamal al-Harith; in 2001, he went to Quetta for a religious holiday, he was then arrested by US troops in Kandahar for allegedly fighting with the Taliban against the British. He was assessed as being involved in terrorist attacks and from 2002, al-Harith was detained at the max security Camp Delta in Guantanamo Bay- Cuba. According to WikiLeaks Department of Defense leaked memorandum of 9 July 2003, al-Harith travelled “extensively in the Middle East between 1992-1996…accompanied by Abu Bakr, a well- known al Qaida operative”; they apparently travelled to Sudan in 1992 when Osama Bin Laden and his network was active. Even though al-Harith had failed lie detection tests and Major General Geoffrey Miller of the US Army revoked the recommendation for release, al-Harith was repatriated to UK.

Lobbying from Tony Blair’s Labour government and the now Manchester Police and Crime Commissioner Tony Lloyd (who was then the local MP) secured his release in 2004. David Blunkett, the Home Secretary at that time, said: “No one who is returned… will actually be a threat to the security of the British people.” Al-Harith claimed he was innocent and tortured, he was apparently awarded approximately £1million of British taxpayers’ money in compensation from the Home Office while Theresa May was Home Secretary. Tony Blair said: “He was not paid compensation by my government. The compensation was agreed in 2010 by the Conservative government.” It was about 2013 when al-Harith escaped from UK to join ISIS in Syria. The conclusion is this money may well have gone to establish ISIS. In 2015, Keith Vaz, a Labour MP, claimed he was going to write to Theresa May, who was still Home Secretary and ask for an investigation. On 20 February, the official Twitter handle for SITE Intel Group, provider of Jihadist/Far Right & Far Left/Cyber Security News, tweeted: “ISIS published a photo of British suicide bomber grinning Abu Zakariya al-Britani in his vehicle full of explosives, who then struck Popular Mobilization militiamen southwest of Mosul.” On 22 February 2017, The Huffington Post sent a reporter to quiz the Prime Minister’s spokesman. The reporter asked 18 questions to which the spokesman had no comment.

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