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Mouloud Sihali is another Algerian facing deportation and living under strict control orders as a terror suspect. Mouloud was charged with involvement in a plot to poison thousands with ricin in 2002. He was found not guilty by a jury but was arrested again after the London bombings of July 7, 2005. He was held for four months before being released on special bail, claiming that intelligence files linked him with Al-Qaeda.

Mouloud is another softly spoken, polite and intelligent terror suspect. Handsome and thoughtful, he had plans to study medicine. At 31 he might now be too late. Five years of his life has been taken away, he says, even though the one time when he went before an open court he was found not guilty.

During the three months that I worked on Dispatches: At Home With the Terror Suspects (to be shown tomorrow night on Channel 4 at 8pm) I got to know several of these men fairly well. They are sad, broken people and if they ever were a threat to our national security, they are no longer.

Control orders do not prevent a person breaking the law if they so wish. Three “controllees” have absconded and remain on the run. Mouloud is free to travel on the London Underground.

“If I wanted to, it would be easy for me to bomb or commit an act of terrorism and kill thousands of people,” he says with a dark humour.

The plight of the Belmarsh 12 strains the most cherished tenets of Britain’s legal system. Detention without trial or knowing the evidence against you — albeit under house arrest — was akin to practices that successive UK governments condemned outright in Soviet Russia and the eastern bloc. The government is planning to widen the principle behind control orders to create “Super Asbos” for men suspected of fraud or drug dealing. Mere suspicion will be enough to curb their freedom and they will have no appeal.

We should also remember why the Belmarsh 12 were not deported in 2001: because it would mean returning them to countries that practise torture.

When I said my final goodbye to Detainee A, news had filtered back that two of the detainees, who returned to Algeria last month, “Q” and “K”, had disappeared, believed to be in the custody of Algeria’s feared military security service.

I left Detainee A packing his bags, fearing his fate when he lands in Algeria. But he added: “They can only torture me physically for a week or two. Life under a control order is a never-ending mental torture that I cannot bear.”

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