Ex-British soldier who led Afghan exodus tortured by the Taliban ‘for being a spy’
A FORMER British soldier captured while leading a daring desert escape from Afghanistan has described how he endured weeks of prison beatings from Taliban militants who suspected he was a spy.
Ben Slater says he was punched, kicked and lashed by up to ten guards at a time in a Guantanamo Bay-like prison run by the Islamist group’s intelligence arm.
‘I was the ultimate catch for them,’ the former Royal Military Police officer told The Mail on Sunday.
Mr Slater, who ran a non-profit organisation in Kabul, was trying to lead nearly 400 of his mainly female staff and their families towards Afghanistan’s border with Pakistan when he was detained by a gun-toting Taliban patrol.
He was dragged to a jail where he thought he would be killed, as Taliban thugs – many of them previously held by the Americans for terrorism offences – beat him without ‘any remorse’.
He said: ‘They didn’t give me any chance of dialogue, they said, “Shut up, you are a spy.” Some of my interrogators were former Guantanamo detainees and some were jailed at Bagram air base in Afghanistan. One of my prison guards lost a limb in a Nato airstrike. You just knew this was not going to end well.’
The 37-year-old had been taken to a Taliban base at Jalalabad which was previously a CIA interrogation centre and was thrown in a windowless cell holding four fighters from Islamic State, also known as Daesh. ‘It was horrendous, I was breaking bread with Daesh,’ he said. ‘I tried to crack some jokes so we didn’t kill each other.’
While he was being escorted to an interrogation session, Taliban guards pushed him down a flight of stairs before attacking him with fists and feet. They then lashed him with cables, forcing the ex-soldier to cower on the ground. ‘I was a blue-eyed British soldier. I was literally the ultimate catch,’ he said.
Interrogators hoped he would confess to being a spy. After two weeks of daily beatings and brutal questioning, Mr Slater’s captors began to accept he was not a member of the intelligence services.
Mr Slater, who grew up in Devon, was released last Monday, after a delegation led by Sir Simon Gass – Boris Johnson’s special envoy to Afghanistan – and Martin Longden, the UK’s chargé d’affaires, met
Taliban leaders in Kabul. He last night thanked the Prime Minister, but appealed to him to help the rest of his staff escape.
‘All I care about is these vulnerable people and getting as many out as I can,’ he said. ‘If I have to go over the same thing again, and get captured by the Taliban, I will.’ Mr Slater – who has been working in Afghanistan for the past eight years – is chairman of a development organisation called Nomad Concepts Group, which employed more than 1,000 Afghans in Kabul to help vulnerable women.