A chef who cooked in London restaurants for 16 years has been released from Guantanamo Bay and flown secretly to Morocco after ministers refused to intervene to secure his return to Britain.

Ahmed Errachidi’s lawyers were told of his release yesterday but US sources said he arrived in Morocco on Tuesday.

Neither his legal team nor his family have been able to make contact with him and they fear that he has been taken to a secret detention centre.

Mr Errachidi, 40, who suffers from bipolar disorder, was held for five years in the US military internment camp on the basis of a false claim by an unidentified informant that he received military training at a terrorist camp in Afghanistan in July 2001. But The Times has seen payslips, bank documents and witness statements that prove that Mr Errachidi was working at the five-star Westbury Hotel in Mayfair that month and sending money to his relatives in Morocco.

It was after that evidence was produced to the US authorities by his British lawyers that they agreed, two months ago, to release him from Camp Delta.

Diplomatic negotiations about his release began but the Foreign and Commonwealth Office declined to participate because, although he had lived in Britain since 1984, Mr Errachidi was not a British citizen.

Clive Stafford Smith, Mr Errachidi’s lawyer, condemned the FCO’s stance and said that the Government must take steps to discover where he was.

“It is crucial that Britain contacts Morocco urgently to establish Ahmed’s whereabouts and seek assurances about his treatment,” said Mr Stafford Smith.

Emily Thornberry, Mr Errachidi’s constituency MP, also appealed for the Government to help him. “I’m very worried that he could just disappear into the Moroccan prison system,” said Ms Thornberry, Labour MP for Islington South and Finsbury.

Mr Errachidi came to London from Morocco in the mid1980s and took his first kitchen job as a grill chef at the Hard Rock Cafe in 1985. In 1997 he became head chef at Centuria, an Islington gastropub. Mr Errachidi married a British woman but the marriage ended in divorce and he remarried, to a Moroccan woman with whom he has two sons.

He visited them in Morocco but continued to work in London and in 2000 instructed solicitors to apply to the Home Office for indefinite leave to remain in Britain. That application was still tied up in the bureaucracy of the Immigration and Nationality Directorate when a family crisis struck in September 2001. His youngest son became seriously ill and Mr Errachidi wanted to be at his side.His friends say Mr Errachidi came up with a scheme to raise money to pay for his son’s medical treatment by buying silver cheaply in Pakistan and selling it for profit.

In late September, he has told his lawyers, he flew to Pakistan to buy the silver. He was there when the USled coalition began bombing Afghanistan and felt moved to cross the border to perform his Islamic duty of zakat [charity].

Mr Stafford Smith said: “The biggest question you can ask about Ahmed’s story is why did he end up going to help people in Afghanistan when his son was ill at home. But you have to remember that he has bipolar disorder and that condition affects his judgment and makes him susceptible to having unrealistic ideas about what he can do. He thought he was going to save people.”

In and out

— 380 detainees are still at Guantanamo Bay

— 395 detainees have been released since 2002 and returned to countries including Afghanistan, Australia, Bangladesh, Bahrain, Belgium, Britain, Denmark, Egypt, France, Germany, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Libya, Morocco, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Spain, Sudan, Tajikistan, Turkey, Uganda and Yemen

— Seven Britons were freed in 2004 and 2005; eight others are still there

Source: US Department of Defence; Times database

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