Pilot wins right to UK compensation

An Algerian pilot who spent five months in jail wrongly accused of training September 11th hijackers won the right to claim compensation…

An Algerian pilot who spent five months in jail wrongly accused of training September 11th hijackers won the right to claim compensation from the British government in a legal ruling today.

Lotfi Raissi, 33, was arrested in London 10 days after the September 11th, 2001 attacks and held at the high-security Belmarsh prison in the southeast of the capital.

Even though the allegations against him were proved false, Raissi says he is now blacklisted from all airline jobs and his life has been ruined.

After the appeal court ruling, Raissi said he also wanted a public apology from the British government.

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"I want a widely publicised apology for the part that they played. I am not a terrorist, I abhor terrorism," he told BBC television.

The British government rejected a claim for compensation lodged by Raissi in 2004.

But today the Court of Appeal in London ordered the government to reconsider the compensation claim, saying that the way extradition proceedings and refusals of bail had been conducted were "an abuse of process".

The Ministry of Justice said it was considering whether to appeal the ruling.

The United States had argued Raissi was linked to Hani Hanjour, the pilot suspected of crashing a passenger plane into the Pentagon in Washington.

It had sought to extradite Raissi on two counts of falsifying an application for a US pilot's licence, but a British court dismissed the charges in 2002.

In an interview with Channel Four News, Raissi said: "I have been through an appalling tragedy... I have been struggling for the last six years and-a-half."

"I suffered a great injustice," he said. "I believe I can restore my life and go back to aviation and get on with my life."