Ex-Terror Suspects Released

All four men who were arrested on their return to Britain from U.S. military detention at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, were released Wednesday without charge, police said.

A fifth man, Jamal Harith, had not been arrested when the group arrived Tuesday at Northolt Royal Air Force Base west of London, and he was freed within hours. The four released Wednesday had been identified as Rhuhel Ahmed, Tarek Dergoul, Asif Iqbal and Shafiq Rasul.

The four had been arrested under an anti-terrorism law, but their lawyers and relatives insisted that the men were innocent.

Max Clifford, a spokesman for Dergoul’s family, said Dergoul had told relatives that he had been traveling in Afghanistan when captured and was in “the wrong place at the wrong time.”

After being detained by U.S. forces, he contacted his family in March 2002 to say he was being held in the Afghan city of Kandahar.

When the men were not all immediately released upon their return to Britain, supporters said the Britons deserved liberty after up to two years of detention without charge or lawyers.

“My wife has been crying for the last 18 months, and I am angry,” Ahmed’s father, Riasoth, told reporters outside his home in Tipton, in central England. “For 18 months, I have been saying he is not a terrorist.”

Prime Minister Tony Blair’s government has said the returned men may pose a security risk, but the decision on whether to press charges was up to prosecutors, not Blair’s ministers.

The U.S. government says the roughly 640 prisoners held at Guantanamo are there because of suspicions that they have links to Afghanistan’s fallen Taliban regime or the Al Qaeda terrorist network.

The U.S. and Britain will continue talks on four Britons still imprisoned at Guantanamo.