LONDON, May 6: British intelligence knew in advance that a former London janitor now awaiting trial by a US military commission in Guantanamo Bay would be tortured in an Arab country to extract evidence, his lawyers allege.

Lawyers for Ethiopian-born Binyam Mohamed, 29, filed a High Court case on Tuesday to try to force the British government to give evidence that would help his defence to expected charges before the tribunal at the US detention camp in Cuba.

They say a British security official interviewed Mohamed after he was arrested in Pakistan in April 2002, and told him he would be transferred to an Arab country and tortured.

Mohamed says he was flown to Morocco in July 2002 on a CIA plane and held there for 18 months, during which time he says he was repeatedly stripped naked and cut with a scalpel on his chest and penis. He was transferred to Afghanistan in 2004 and finally, later that year, to Guantanamo.

His lawyer Clive Stafford Smith said the British authorities had a duty to reveal what they knew, in order to support his case that terrorism allegations against him are false and based on torture.

“The issue here is not really legal, the issue is moral,” Stafford Smith told a news conference.

“What possible moral position can the British government take that gives them the right to deny this sort of assistance to a person who’s have a razor blade taken to his genitals?”

Mohamed told Stafford Smith that an officer of Britain’s Security Service, MI5, told him in the 2002 interview in Pakistan that he would be transferred to a third country.

“They gave me a cup of tea with a lot of sugar in it. I initially only took one. ‘No, you need a lot more. Where you’re going, you need a lot of sugar,’” Mohamed quoted the officer as saying.

“I didn’t know what he meant by this, but I figured he meant some poor country in Arabia. One of them did tell me I was going to get tortured by the Arabs.”

While under interrogation in Morocco, Mohamed says he was asked questions about his life in London that could only have been based on information supplied by British authorities.

A British parliamentary committee said last year there was a “reasonable probability” that intelligence passed from Britain to the United States was used to interrogate Mohamed.

The committee’s report, parts of which were deleted for national security reasons, said it did not know whether he was held and tortured in Morocco.

Tuesday’s High Court case was filed against British Foreign Secretary David Miliband. No comment was immediately available from the Foreign Office.

Mohamed’s case has been highlighted in investigations by human rights groups and the Council of Europe into alleged “extraordinary renditions” by the US Central Intelligence Agency — secret flights to deliver suspected terrorists to countries where they then faced torture.—Reuters