Brothers insist detainee into fashion, not fighting

29 Jan, 2002 09:23 AM6 mins to read

The family of a British prisoner are bemused by his arrest. SEVERIN CARRELL reports.

TIPTON - Shafiq Rasul is the youngest brother of the family, a 24-year-old who cared more for Ralph Lauren and Armani sweaters, sports cars, gangsta rap and Club 18-30 trips than the strictures of the Koran.

Not the man the British Foreign Office says is being held at Camp X-Ray in Cuba, among the world's most notorious terrorists.

Not the bearded and unkempt man in an Afghan hat, pictured in British newspapers lying on straw and with a seeping bullet wound in his left shoulder.

Nor, his three brothers insist, was he the hot-headed vigilante who set up an armed gang called the Tipton Asian Terror Squad at Alexandra High School to tackle white racists.

Or the man who later became involved in the fringes of radical Islam in Britain.

He was ordinary. Born and bred in the West Midlands town of Tipton, Shafiq never got into trouble with the police, and had only "minor scrapes" at school. He was a softly spoken and mild-mannered stockroom clerk, who had taken leave to do a three-month Microsoft software engineering course in Pakistan.

"He's not the type to be involved in a movement such as the Taleban or al Qaeda," said his eldest brother, Habib, in a rich West Midlands accent as he sat beside his computers in his bedroom on the third floor of the family home.

The Americans, he insists, have the wrong man. "He wouldn't have these types of connections. For him first to get to Afghanistan then get arrested is just the wildest thing in the world. It's just crazy."

Parvez Akhtar, a family friend and lawyer who grew up with the brothers, agreed. "He's more likely to go to Charlie Brown's nightclub in Birmingham than go to some fundamentalist Pakistani forum."

For the Rasul family, the past seven days have indeed been wild, since the polite phone call from the Foreign Office that Shafiq was being detained at Camp X-Ray.

"At first I thought it was a prank call from one of my American colleagues," said Habib, who works as an IT specialist for a US multinational. "I just put the phone down and two minutes later my mobile phone rang, and it was my brother, saying Shafiq was in Cuba."

Since then, the Rasuls have barely left their house, besieged by reporters. The Special Branch police officers who finally arrived to interview them at the weekend, and the Foreign Office, have asked numerous questions but given them no answers.

The most that the Foreign Office has confirmed is that Shafiq is alive.

"There are questions we still want an answer to," said Habib. "What the hell was he doing in Afghanistan? How the hell did he get there? Someone probably said, 'Let's go and help the refugees. Let's go and do aid work'. We don't know. He's just not a violent person."

Claims that Shafiq was linked directly to three other men from Tipton arrested or missing in Afghanistan are riddled with inconsistencies, they insist. He had last been to Pakistan when he was 2, rarely prayed or went to the mosque, had no experience with guns, little interest in politics and could speak Punjabi, his mother tongue, only with difficulty.

Although he knew at least one detainee from Tipton, Asif Iqbal, they were four years apart in age and from different crowds.

Shafiq, Iqbal also at Camp X-Ray, Kandahar detainee Ruhal Ahmed and another Tipton man, Munir Ali, believed to be missing in Afghanistan, had all attended Alexandra High School in Tipton.

One of the poorest towns in Britain, it was hard hit by the decline of the area's mining, iron and engineering industries since the late 1970s.

Habib told of Shafiq's reaction to the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. "When September 11 happened, I came home and he said, 'Look what's happened on the telly'. He was just shocked.

"He said, 'You know, in the World Trade Center, there are hundreds of Muslims'."

Shafiq had flown to Pakistan in mid-October on his own, travelling to Lahore via Karachi and his father's home village in the Punjab. Microsoft courses in Pakistan cost roughly a tenth of the £3500 ($11,600) he would be charged in Britain, and Shafiq and Habib had plans to go into the computing business together.

His attempts to study law at the University of Central England in Birmingham had foundered after a year.

The family said their last contact with Shafiq, after several phone calls, was an e-mail on October 25 from Lahore, asking Habib for advice on which module to take.

What happened after that leaves the brothers bemused. "He could only have been in Afghanistan for two months maximum, and the US are claiming he became an al Qaeda terrorist, when he's never seen the world before?" said Hafiz. "Perhaps the Americans grabbed the first guys they found and said, 'We've got the worst of the worst'."

The family were too distracted by an earlier tragedy to worry that Shafiq had not been in touch. The infant son of his brother Hafiz was in Birmingham children's hospital dying slowly from incurable lung failure.

On December 24, the 2-year-old, Zyad, finally died. That day, Habib left word for Shafiq about the death with their relatives in Pakistan.

In Shafiq's freshly decorated bedroom on the first floor of their neat but modestly furnished three-storey house, his older brother Murtza, 32, rifled through the clothes that Shafiq had left behind, saying they were evidence of his brother's Western tastes.

Soon there was a pile of Armani jeans, adidas shirts and baggy tracksuit bottoms on the floor. On a nearby bookcase was Shafiq's tiny library, featuring two cheap volumes of Shakespeare and a collection of E.M. Forster, alongside a few electronics and computing textbooks.

Habib said: "This all just scares the hell out of me. All we want is to get Shafiq home and get a fair trial. We want the truth to come out."

- INDEPENDENT

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