FRFI is supporting the campaign by the family and friends of Mahdi Hashi, a 24-year-old Somali youth worker from Kentish Town, north London. Mahdi disappeared in December 2011, while on a trip to Somalia, and turned up a year later in court in Brooklyn, New York. He is now being held in a US prison on terrorism charges.
Mahdi’s family fled civil war in Somalia when he was six and have lived in London since. When Mahdi was 16, he and fellow youth workers were asked to become spies for MI5. Mahdi refused and lodged an official complaint, whereupon MI5 agents told him: ‘you either work for us or you are guilty of being a terrorist’.
In July 2012 Mahdi’s family received a letter from the Home Office saying Mahdi had been stripped of his British citizenship ‘for the public good’, as the Security Service claimed he had ‘been involved in Islamist extremism’ and presented ‘a risk to the national security of the United Kingdom due to [his] extremist activities’. There is no evidence of any such involvement.
According to Mahdi’s lawyers, he was detained in Djibouti in June 2012, where he witnessed the torture of cellmates and was told to sign a confession or be tortured too. He was eventually rendered to the United States, where he remains imprisoned. For more information see http://mahdihashi.net/
Nazia Mukti
Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! 233 June/July 2013
