Rashid Rauf, pictured, a high-ranking Al Qaeda planner who was killed by a CIA drone strike
The family of a high-ranking Al Qaeda planner killed by a CIA drone strike are to sue the British government for helping to murder him.
Rashid Rauf, a fugitive Briton who played a pivotal role in coordinating the airline bomb plot, was reportedly killed in a U.S missile attack on a Taliban safe house in Pakistan's tribal areas in 2008.
His family is now to launch a legal challenge accusing the Government of being complicit in the murder of one of its own citizens on foreign soil.
British intelligence officers who shared information about him with their US counterparts may be judged to have assisted in his murder, or of committing war crimes.
Rauf, 27, a former baker's boy from Birmingham, was on a CIA ‘High Value Target’ list because of his alleged role as a chief planner for Al Qaeda attacks on the West.
Intelligence services also believe he was the brains behind the July 7 London tube attacks, and that he masterminded the failed 2006 plot to blow up US airliners flying from Heathrow, using liquid bombs.
A close friend of the family, who have always maintained that Rauf had no links with Al Qaeda, told the Sunday Mercury: 'They want justice for their son who was killed in murky circumstances that amount to cold-blooded murder.
Rashid never had a chance to defend or explain himself. He was accused of some heinous crimes and without any trial, judge or jury he was blown to pieces by a unmanned Predator drone aircraft controlled by a soldier sitting thousands of miles away in the US.
'The Americans could not have found and killed him without help from British intelligence officers who shared information.
'The family want answers. They want to see the evidence that Rashid was a dangerous terrorist.'
The British government has consistently refused to say whether or not its signals intelligence agency, the Cheltenham-based GCHQ, passes information in support of the CIA drone operations over Pakistan.
But media reports have quoted sources at GCHQ claiming it has better interception networks than the CIA in south Asia, and that it has shared information about the locations of Al Qaeda and Taliban commanders in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Intelligence services believe Rauf, centre, was the brains behind the July 7 London tube attacks, and that he masterminded the failed 2006 plot to blow up US airliners flying from Heathrow.
The Rauf family have been encouraged to launch their legal challenge after lawyers for a young Pakistani man, whose father was killed by a drone strike, seek to have the sharing of UK locational intelligence declared unlawful.
Noor Khan, 27, is said to live in constant fear of a repeat of the attack in North Waziristan in March last year which killed more than 40 other people.
In a landmark case at the High Court in London last week, Mr Khan launched an application for a judicial review examining the UK’s alleged complicity in the CIA’s drone campaign.
If Khan’s case is successful, judges will be forced to examine whether GCHQ officers can legally share information on the location of individuals if they believe this may be used to target them with drone strikes.
Khan’s barrister Martin Chamberlain told High Court judges that while soldiers who kill as part of an international armed conflict are protected from prosecution, it’s unclear whether the turmoil in Pakistan’s volatile tribal belt constitutes a war.
A spokesman for human rights charity Reprieve said: 'This anomaly could make the killings unlawful and British officials who shared intelligence leading to those killings would be guilty of accessory to murder.
'Even if this is held to be a war, the drone strikes could break international humanitarian law by exceeding what ‘proportionate and necessary’ is leaving officers who share intelligence at risk of assisting crimes against humanity or war crimes.'
A spokesman for the Rauf family last night said their legal action would not be intended to convict any individuals of a crime but to seek a declaration by the British civil courts that such intelligence sharing is unlawful.
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