A FORMER British inmate at Guantanamo Bay who shared a £20m compensation payout from taxpayers has been linked to the Isis killer known as Jihadi John.
The Sunday Times has established that Tarek Dergoul travelled by road to Portugal with Mohammed Emwazi in 2011 where they met a Syrian terror suspect. A year later Emwazi went to Syria to join jihadists.
Dergoul, 38, admitted yesterday that MI5 was aware of his relationship with Emwazi but condemned the former London student’s subsequent spree of beheadings for Isis.
The link to Emwazi follows the discovery by this newspaper that Jamal al-Harith, another previous Guantanamo inmate from the UK who received £1m in compensation for his incarceration, is now fighting with Isis in Syria.
At least 800 British Muslims have travelled to the region to join terrorist groups. Emwazi has been the most notorious having carried out the murders of seven western hostages, including two British aid workers, before he was killed by a drone strike last November.
Advertisement
Emwazi, a former computer programming student at Westminster University, came onto the radar of MI5 in 2009 after he was stopped in Tanzania.
The security services believe he was trying to join al-Shabaab terrorists in Somalia. He was later named in court papers as part of a network of extremists from west London who were supporting terrorism in east Africa.
Despite that Emwazi was able to travel with Dergoul by road from London to Lisbon in the summer of 2011, raising questions about how closely he was being monitored.
The man they met in Portugal, who cannot be named for legal reasons, is a Syrian national who was sent to Guantanamo Bay after being captured in Afghanistan.
The Americans accused him of being a member of al-Qaeda, but he was never charged and was later released.
Advertisement
According to one account of the Lisbon meeting, the three men were met by local intelligence officials. Emwazi and Dergoul apparently told them that they had no extremist links and were on a sightseeing trip.
This weekend Dergoul declined to answer questions about the Portugal visit, but admitted knowing the Syrian terror suspect. “We were in prison together,” he said at his home in west London. “Of course I know this guy.”
He condemned the atrocities carried out by Emwazi. “Obviously, I don’t agree [with what he did],” he said. “What can I do? Just because someone knows someone, you can’t just ruin his life.”
Dergoul, the son of a Moroccan baker, was sent to Guantanamo, the US naval base in Cuba, in 2002 where he claims he was physically abused.
He had travelled to Pakistan in 2001, purportedly to learn Arabic, and claims he entered neighbouring Afghanistan to buy land, having spotted “a business opportunity” after the US invasion.
Advertisement
Dergoul has denied US allegations that he underwent terrorist training and was wounded fleeing the Tora Bora mountains where Osama bin Laden, then the al-Qaeda leader, had been hiding.
He was one of five Britons, including al-Harith, now 49, to be released from the prison camp in March 2004.
Dergoul and al-Harith, from Manchester, were among a group of 16 former Guantanamo detainees from the UK who later sued the British government, claiming that MI5 and MI6 had been complicit in their incarceration and mistreatment.
In 2010 they were collectively awarded a £20m payout by ministers.
When asked about his 2011 trip to Portugal with Emwazi, Dergoul initially said: “I don’t know what you are talking about.”
Advertisement
Pressed on why he had not previously disclosed his relationship with Emwazi, he said: “Why should I? MI5 know . . . What’s so secret about it? I’ve got nothing to hide. Any country I’ve been to, it’s on file . . . The police would be standing here now if there’s anything wrong.”
Distancing himself from Emwazi, Dergoul added: “Anyone who leaves this country and goes to another and does what they do, that’s neither here nor there. What’s that got to do with his teacher or his schoolfriends or the people he went to the mosque with?”
Dergoul has previously directed media requests for interviews to Cage, a controversial advocacy organisation that last year described Emwazi as “a beautiful young man”.
Emwazi, whose victims included the British aid workers David Haines and Alan Henning, had turned to Cage in 2009 complaining that he was being “harassed” by MI5.