British 'suicide bomber': Theresa May urged to restore control orders

The former home secretary David Blunkett has called on Theresa May to consider restoring control orders after a British ex-inmate of Guantánamo was believed to have carried out a suicide bombing for Islamic State in Iraq.

A minister will face questions in the Commons about the case of Jamal al-Harith after Yvette Cooper, the Labour chair of the home affairs select committee, was granted an urgent question.

Blunkett, who was home secretary when Harith was released from the US military detention centre, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programmethat it was a shame the requirements for control orders had been “weakened” by the coalition government in 2010.

He said he hoped the prime minister would “review whether some of the measures taken from 2010 in weakening those requirements might be reviewed”.

Control orders imposed strict conditions on those believed to pose a terror risk, even if they had not been convicted of a crime. These included intensive monitoring and even relocation of suspects to other parts of the country, and lasted indefinitely. The coalition replaced them with terrorism prevention and investigation measures (Tpims), which can last for up to two years.

Harith, who was born as Ronald Fiddler, was released from Guantánamo in 2004 and was among former detainees awarded compensation in 2010. His family said he was “utterly changed” by his experiences in the camp. He travelled to Syria in 2014 and social media released earlier this week showed him apparently preparing to carry out a suicide bombing in Mosul, Iraq.

Blunkett also called for examination of how compensation awarded by the government to Harith and other British former Guantánamo residents had been used. In 2010 the government awarded £20m to 17 former Guantánamo detainees rather than go through court proceedings that would have demanded disclosure of sensitive intelligence-related material.

Much of the money would have been used up in legal fees, he pointed out. But asked whether cash from the government could effectively have ended up funding Isis, he said: “I think it’s an extremely good question.”

“We need to examine whether the money laundering requirements in these cases have been robust enough – not because we know any of this money has been transferred out of the country but because we need to reassure people.”

The former home secretary criticised some reporting of the story, saying without naming outlets, that it had aimed to “whip up fear and uncertainty”. But he also hit out at the government’s handling of the issue, saying: “We need a logical, rational response to issues of this sort and I hope the government will give that, because they haven’t over the last 24 hours.”

Blunkett defended the release of Harith and other former Guantánamo detainees in a Guardian article on Wednesday. On Thursday he said: “I’m just very relieved that the broad assurance I gave back in 2004 with the best possible intentions turned out – domestically, in the communities I was dealing with – turned out to be correct.”

Cully Stimson, a former US defence department adviser on detainee affairs, told the programme research had shown over 30% of Guantánamo “graduates” had been found to return to the battlefield in some capacity.

He anticipated that the US president, Donald Trump, who promised during his campaign to “load up Guantánamo with bad dudes” would re-open entries to the detention centre. “It’s a reasonable guess that he will start using Guantánamo for al-Qaida and Taliban members, and maybe even Isis members,” he said.