Kafka is alive and well and working for the Home Office. From the Independent:
Guantanamo inmate told: You can’t return to UK, you’ve been away too long By Ben Russell, Political Correspondent
Published: 15 June 2007Gordon Brown is being urged to intervene to stop the Home Office banning a British resident from returning home after more than four years at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba.
Campaigners expressed fury after ministers said Jamil el-Banna’s permission to stay in Britain had lapsed during the four-and-a-half years he has been held without charge at the US detention camp. [My emphasis]
Mr Banna’s son, Anas, 10, will deliver a letter to Gordon Brown today, asking the prime minister-in-waiting to let his father return home for Father’s Day on Sunday. Anas asked Mr Brown:
“I hope you won’t say that my dad was away from the country for more than two years as they say. My dad was only out of the country because he was locked up over there. They stopped him from coming back to us. Now my Dad can leave and we hope he comes back to us. I hope he comes back to us before 17 June, before Father’s Day. Every year this day is very sad for us. I hope that this year, this day will be the best day of my life.”
Mr Banna was arrested in The Gambia in 2002 with another former Guantanamo detainee, Bisher al-Rawi, who has been freed. The two men had travelled to west Africa to set up a peanut processing plant but were arrested and taken to Afghanistan and Guantanamo after an MI5 tip-off.
