A former British soldier is captured while leading a daring desert Afghanistan described how he spent several weeks in prison Taliban The militants suspected that he was a spy.
Ben Slater says he was punched, kicked and beaten up by ten guards at once in a prison like Guantanamo Bay run by the Islamic group’s intelligence wing.
“I was the last catch for him,” a former Royal Military Police officer told The Mail on Sunday.
37-year-old Ben Slater was caught trying to escort around 400 people to the Pakistani border
Mr. Slater, who ran a non-profit organization in Kabul, was trying to move about 400 of his mainly female employees and their families to the border with Afghanistan. Pakistan When he was detained by a gun-toting Taliban patrol.
He was dragged into a prison, where he thought he would be executed as Taliban thugs—many of them previously held by Americans for terrorism crimes—beaten him without remorse.
He said: ‘He didn’t give me any chance to talk,’ he said, “Shut up, you’re a spy.” Some of my interrogators were former Guantanamo prisoners and some were jailed at Bagram airport in Afghanistan.
‘A part of one of my prison guards was lost in a NATO airstrike. You just knew that it would not end well.’
The 37-year-old was taken to a Taliban hideout in Jalalabad, formerly a CIA interrogation center, and thrown into a windowless cell holding four Islamic State fighters, also known as Daesh.
He said, ‘It was terrible, I was breaking bread with Daesh.’ ‘I tried to crack some jokes so that we don’t kill each other.’
As he was being taken to an interrogation session, Taliban guards pushed him down a flight of stairs before attacking him with fists and legs.
“It was like bullies in a playground, when they have someone on the ground,” he said.
‘About ten of them were kicking knots at me.’
Then they beat him with cables and wires, causing the former soldier to fall to the ground.
‘If you had a buffet of hatred for these people at the time… I was a blue-eyed British soldier.
I was literally the last catch,’ he said. Taliban guards put a hood on his head and dragged him barefoot into a room where interrogators along with a translator beat him up.
In the hope that he would confess to being a British spy.
After two weeks of daily beatings and brutal interrogation, Mr. Slater’s captors began to believe he was not a member of the intelligence services and was taken to the same cell for a week.
He was then transferred to a prison in Kabul for political prisoners.
Mr Slater, who grew up in Devon, was released from Taliban captivity last Monday, following a delegation led by Sir Simon Gass – Boris Johnson’s special envoy to Afghanistan – and Britain’s in-charge D’ Effair Martin Longden meets with Taliban leaders in Kabul.
Mr. Slater was flown from Kabul to Qatar with the British delegation. He thanked the prime minister for getting him out of Afghanistan last night, but appealed to him to help the rest of his staff escape.
“I only care about these vulnerable people and get out as much as I can,” he said.
‘If I have to go to the same thing again, and get captured by the Taliban, I’ll do it again.’
Mr Slater – who has lived and worked in Afghanistan for the past eight years – is the chairman of an international development organization called Nomad Concepts Group, which employed more than 1,000 Afghans in Kabul to help vulnerable women and girls .
When the Taliban entered Kabul on 15 August, Mr. Slater began making plans to evacuate 100 of his workers.
“Threats had started pouring in from the Taliban against my female employees,” he said.
He managed to get some through the Kabul airport but the Home Office could not provide visas for all the workers.
When the airport closed, Mr Slater, his staff and his family boarded a convoy of minibuses and taxis to make the dangerous six-hour journey across the Torkham border with Pakistan.
But when the group of about 400 reached the border, Mr. Slater learned that the British High Commission in Islamabad had not provided the necessary visas to cross the border, so the convoy had to camp at a nearby hotel. The hotel was raided on 2 September.
Most of the guests – including almost all of his staff – fled but Mr Slater was detained and taken to a makeshift prison in Torkham before being taken 60 miles to Jalalabad.
He said the plight of the Afghans still brought him to tears, adding: ‘There are mothers in Kabul who are selling their young daughters for a week’s worth of food. Others are selling their prettiest or youngest daughters to older men to allow them to cross the border.’
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