British radical trained in Pak charged in US dirty bombing case

London, June 5 : A British resident imprisoned in Guant¡namo Bay has been charged by the US for plotting the bomb attacks from secret training camps in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Binyam Ahmed Mohamed, an Ethiopian who came to Britain as a teenager, is accused of planning to blow up apartment buildings in the US, The Times reported.

The Pentagon's chargesheet for the 30-year-old, who had training as an electrical engineer, states he was selected for "a specialised terrorist mission".

Mohamed is one of two British residents still held at Guantanamo despite requests for their release from the British Government.

His lawyers insisted on Wednesday that the evidence against him had been extracted under torture. They condemned the charges as part of a "rush to charge as many people as possible prior to President Bush leaving office."

They filed a lawsuit in London last month in an attempt to force the British Government to hand over documents proving that the prisoner was tortured before being sent to Guantanamo.

Mohamed was arrested in Pakistan in 2002 and taken to Morocco by the CIA. He is said to have conspired with Jose Padilla, an American citizen convicted by a federal court last year of conspiracy and material support for terrorism. Padilla was sentenced to 17 years in prison in January.

The Pentagon alleged that he and Padilla were instructed by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-confessed mastermind of 9/11, to rent apartments in large US cities, fill the corridors and air ducts with natural gas and a radioactive material and detonate the mixture.

Mohamed faces life imprisonment if convicted. It will be Mohammed's first public appearance since his dramatic arrest in 2003 when Pakistani police stormed the villa where he was hiding.

They handed him over to the CIA, which held him in a series of secret overseas prisons for three years before sending him to Guantanamo.

ANI