Four businessmen who were arrested in the United Arab Emirates have been tortured into making confessions and could face the death penalty, according to a United Nations report and a legal opinion obtained by their British lawyer.
The plight of the four men, who variously hold Libyan, American and Canadian citizenship, has been taken up by Labour’s justice spokesman, Andy Slaughter, who is concerned about UK links to the Gulf state and previous complaints by Britons about being tortured in Dubai.
The legal opinion by Geoffrey Robertson QC, a former UN judge, says the four businessmen – Salim Alaradi, who has Libyan and Canadian nationalities, Kamal and Mohamed Eldarrat, who have Libyan and US nationalities, and Issa al-Manna, a Libyan – have been wrongly accused of funding a terrorist organisation. They are due to go on trial in the secretive state security chamber court in Abu Dhabi on Monday.
Alaradi was holidaying with his family at a beach hotel in Dubai when he was arrested last summer by the State Security Agency (SSA), according to Robertson’s report. He was not permitted to notify his family or any lawyer of his arrest.
“[Alaradi] was in secret detention – at an air force base, it is believed – [where] he claims he was tortured, a claim corroborated by serious bruising observed on his body, by similar claims by several of the men who were detained at the same time and have now been released, and by evidence of torture and ill-treatment in the UAE gathered by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch,” the report states.
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