Obsolete

Mahmoud Abu Rideh came to Britain as an asylum seeker in 1995 and was treated for severe post-traumatic stress disorder following his alleged torture at the hands of the Israelis as a teenager living in Gaza.

He was arrested at his home in Surrey on December 17 2001 and has been in detention, first at Belmarsh and now in Broadmoor high security psychiatric hospital, ever since.

The home secretary accuses Mr Abu Rideh of being "an active supporter of various international terrorist groups, including those with links to Osama bin Laden's terrorist network", with activities including fundraising.

Yesterday, the Special Immigration Appeals Commission said that Mr Abu Nideh "was and remains in our view committed to the extremist views, delusions even, which motivated at least some of what he did before detention".

However, it went on to express compassion for the man and the state of his mental health which went into freefall following his detention at Belmarsh.

The judgment says he "genuinely feels a sense of hopelessness and that he is in a growing state of dependency and institutionalisation which is likely to make him rather less able to cope with life outside when he is released, the later that is".

The commission had previously agreed with doctors at Broadmoor who argued that the high security hospital was not the place for Mr Abu Rideh. But the then home secretary, David Blunkett, refused to move him to a lower grade psychiatric hospital.

Last year, Mr Abu Rideh gave an interview to the Guardian at Broadmoor. He pulled up his shirtsleeves, revealing dozens of scars up and down his arms, inflicted using pens, plastic and anything else he can find.

He said that since his detention, he had been repeatedly harming himself, including drinking toilet cleaner and setting himself on fire.

The home secretary justifies the detentions of foreign terror suspects by pointing out that each of the men held is free to leave the UK and return home.

But as a Palestinian refugee Mr Abu Rideh is stateless. "Where can I go, please?"

He said his state of mind had deteriorated to the point where he would prefer to be executed.

"The hospital don't want me here. The Home Office don't want me to go back to prison. Give me an injection and I will be dead and they won't need to spend £140,000 a year on me being in this hospital."

Lawyers acting for Abu Rideh, a Palestinian also held at Broadmoor said police had told him that they knew he was no danger to the public.

The bizarre world of the government's controversial anti-terrorist control orders was yesterday revealed when one of the 10 men who had been detained in high-security institutions for more than three years walked into the Guardian offices without any security escort.

Highlighting the stark contradictions in the control orders, Mahmoud Abu Rideh, who had been detained without charge and trial in Belmarsh prison and Broadmoor psychiatric hospital, is kept under house arrest at night, but is able to roam freely under tagging during the day.

The Palestinian refugee, who was held for three-and-a-half years, says he cannot understand the double standards of the order, and said it was further exacerbating his psychiatric difficulties. He has been diagnosed as mentally ill.

In the first interview from any of the 10 detainees placed under control orders, he said: "I go everywhere now - on the underground, buses, the mosque. But I must be home by 7pm. People think I am dangerous, but I am not dangerous. The government is playing games. If I am a risk to security, why are they letting me out to be with people? I wouldn't do anything silly. I am not a dangerous man."

Mr Abu Rideh's control order says he is a key UK-based contact and provider of financial and logistical support to extreme Islamists with connections to al-Qaida. It says: "You belonged to and have provided support for a network of north African extremists directly involved in terrorist planning in the UK, including the use of toxic chemicals."

Mr Abu Rideh denies this is the case.

The control orders were rushed through parliament earlier this month in the face of widespread opposition. The contradictions inherent in them are clear from Mr Abu Rideh's experiences since being released on bail almost two weeks ago:

· He is not allowed to make arrangements to meet anybody, but he can drop in to see anyone if he does so unannounced;

· He cannot attend any pre-arranged meetings or gatherings, but was present at the anti-war demonstration at Hyde Park last Saturday. He says he stumbled across it while playing football in the park with his children;

· He is banned from having visitors to his home unless they are vetted in advance, but he is allowed to arrange to attend group prayers at a mosque;

· He thinks he is being followed on the tube, but if he calls a taxi, no one tails him.

Mr Abu Rideh told the Guardian that his confusion over how the control orders work, and his lack of support, led him to take a drug overdose last weekend. He was taken to Charing Cross hospital after he swallowed 35 tablets and was not released until Monday evening. He says he cannot bear to live under the conditions imposed by the home secretary.

He said: "I only want to kill myself. I don't want to kill anybody else. I am not a danger to anybody else, but this government has made me a danger to myself. It is just as bad to be free with a control order as it is in Belmarsh prison or Broadmoor hospital."

The vagaries of the government's controversial control orders were highlighted yesterday when a judge was forced to send an alleged international terrorist back to jail in spite of fears that the man would take his own life.

Mahmoud Abu Rideh, who suffers from a severe personality disorder, was sent to Brixton prison last week after he handed himself in at a police station in Fulham, west London, saying he did not want to wear the electronic tag his order stipulated should be round his leg from 7am to 7pm.

Yesterday he pleaded not guilty to breaching his restrictive order. Since he has been in Brixton he has twice tried to kill himself.

Six US planes linked by campaigners to "extraordinary rendition" used UK airports 73 times since 2001, Transport Secretary Alistair Darling has said.

The National Air Traffic Service has previously said there were 200 flights through British airspace in the past five years by the CIA planes associated by campaigners with rendition.

Liberal Democrat foreign affairs spokesman Michael Moore asked Mr Darling for details of landings by six jets with the registration numbers N2189M, N8183J, N970SJ, N129QS, N368CE and N85VM.

In a written Parliamentary answer, Mr Darling confirmed the planes had landed respectively 10, 12, two, five, 20 and 24 times at UK airports since January 1 2001.

But he added: "None of the information held by my department provides evidence that these flights were involved in rendition.

"The British government is not aware of any cases of rendition through the UK since May 1997, apart from the two cases in 1998 about which the foreign secretary has informed Parliament."

The flights revealed by Mr Darling included one stopover on the way between the Afghan capital Kabul and Washington and others stopping on their way to destinations in the Middle East such as Amman in Jordan and Riyadh in Saudi Arabia.

Earlier this week, Mr Straw said claims the US has secretly flown terror suspects through the UK would eventually "fall away" due to lack of evidence.

At his monthly press conference this lunchtime the prime minister, Tony Blair, said he knew about undeclared loans to the Labour party made by individuals who were nominated for peerages but denied they were linked.

"It shouldn't be one in exchange for the other, and it wasn't," he said. He said he took "full responsibility" for a situation in which Labour accepted three loans understood to have totalled £3.5m to help fund the 2005 general election.

The Daily Star has today printed a grovelling apology to the Arsenal and England footballer Ashley Cole following a story last month in which it named him as one of three men allegedly involved in a homosexual orgy.

In its apology, the paper admitted it "got it wrong" with its story of February 21, which was headlined "Gay footie stars named on the net" and identified Cole as the footballer at the centre of claims about a homosexual threesome.

"The Daily Star entirely accepts that Ashley Cole was not involved in any way in this kind of conduct," the apology read. "The stories about him were entirely without foundation. We sincerely apologise to Ashley for the distress which he suffered."

The paper finished its apology by wishing the footballer a speedy recovery from his current injury and extending "best wishes" to him and his fiancee, Cheryl Tweedy, for their wedding later this year.

He said: "I saw a lot of things in Baghdad that were illegal or just wrong. I knew, so others must have known, that this was not the way to conduct operations if you wanted to win the hearts and minds of the local population. And if you don't win the hearts and minds of the people, you can't win the war.

"If we were on a joint counter-terrorist operation, for example, we would radio back to our headquarters that we were not going to detain certain people because, as far as we were concerned, they were not a threat because they were old men or obviously farmers, but the Americans would say 'no, bring them back'.

"The Americans had this catch-all approach to lifting suspects. The tactics were draconian and completely ineffective. The Americans were doing things like chucking farmers into Abu Ghraib [the notorious prison in Baghdad where US troops abused and tortured Iraqi detainees] or handing them over to the Iraqi authorities, knowing full well they were going to be tortured.

"The Americans had a well-deserved reputation for being trigger happy. In the three months that I was in Iraq, the soldiers I served with never shot anybody. When you asked the Americans why they killed people, they would say 'we were up against the tough foreign fighters'. I didn't see any foreign fighters in the time I was over there.

"I can remember coming in off one operation which took place outside Baghdad, where we had detained some civilians who were clearly not insurgents, they were innocent people. I couldn't understand why we had done this, so I said to my troop commander 'would we have behaved in the same way in the Balkans or Northern Ireland?' He shrugged his shoulders and said 'this is Iraq', and I thought 'and that makes it all right?'

"As far as I was concerned that meant that because these people were a different colour or a different religion, they didn't count as much. You can not invade a country pretending to promote democracy and behave like that."

On another operation, Mr Griffin recalls his and other soldiers' frustration at being ordered to detain a group of men living on a farm.

He said: "After you have been on a few operations, experience tells you when you are dealing with insurgents or just civilians and we knew the people we had detained were not a threat.

"One of them was a disabled man who had a leg missing but the Americans still ordered us to load them on the helicopters and bring them back to their base. A few hours later we were told to return half of them and fly back to the farm in daylight. It was a ridiculous order and we ran the risk of being shot down or ambushed, but we still had to do it. The Americans were risking our lives because they refused to listen to our advice the night before. It was typical of their behaviour."

Mr Griffin said he believed that the Americans soldiers viewed the Iraqis in the same way as the Nazis viewed Russians, Jews and eastern Europeans in the Second World War, when they labelled them "untermenschen".

"As far as the Americans were concerned, the Iraqi people were sub-human, untermenschen. You could almost split the Americans into two groups: ones who were complete crusaders, intent on killing Iraqis, and the others who were in Iraq because the Army was going to pay their college fees. They had no understanding or interest in the Arab culture. The Americans would talk to the Iraqis as if they were stupid and these weren't isolated cases, this was from the top down. There might be one or two enlightened officers who understood the situation a bit better but on the whole that was their general attitude. Their attitude fuelled the insurgency. I think the Iraqis detested them."