‘I was thrown in jail with al-Qaeda terrorists over a £4,000 debt’

Published

2 years ago

July 20, 2023

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“I am being held at the airport. Please don’t worry too much,” the message read. “I think I will be okay. But who knows?” Kimberley Glendinning won’t forget the moment she read those words. “My heart actually missed a beat,” she says, her voice quavering.

In September 2022, Kimberley’s husband, Brian, was on his way to a job in Iraq. He’d worked in the oil industry for years, often abroad. She was used to it.

So when he left their home in Kincardine, Scotland, she was expecting him to check in during his stopover in Dubai, and again on arrival in Basra. His message from Dubai was cheerful. But when he landed in Basra – everything changed. Brian had been detained because of an Interpol Red Notice.

“It was horrible,” Kimberley says.

Brian, who is 44, has three children with Kimberley. Nobody knew when or how he would be released. He was moved from Basra to a prison in the capital Baghdad where he was able to convince the prison guards to let him call home occasionally, but his family never knew when the phone would ring.

The Red Notice was uploaded to Interpol by Qatar, and dates back about five years to when Brian was living and working there as an oil engineer. He had taken out a bank loan and was working and paying it off until he became ill, left Qatar and lost his job.

Back in the UK, Brian says he contacted the bank to try and figure out a repayment plan. But he had paid most of it off and figured he would settle it eventually. In the meantime, the bank took him to court and that court issued a warrant for his arrest, and made a request for a Red Notice through Interpol.

Brian’s prison conditions in Baghdad, where he spent the majority of his time, were poor. The toilet was an open drain in the corner of a cell which he shared with 42 people, some of them hardened criminals. He had to pay some of them for protection.

Click to subscribe to Dirty Work: The Misuse of Interpol Red Notices

“In his words, they were al Qaeda terrorists. People who have murdered their own father,” says John Glendinning, Brian’s brother who dropped everything to help coordinate his release. “And Brian’s in for about the last £4-5,000 of a loan. It doesn’t make sense.”

Kimberley was equally stunned. Her husband is a good guy, she says, and has never been in trouble before. Her mind kept racing with dark thoughts about what he might be going through. She was afraid that even if she did get her husband back – he might never be the same again.

“Brian said to me that there’s things that he’s seen in that cell… he never thought he’d see in his lifetime.”

Representatives of the Qatari government and the national bank were approached for comment and have not responded.

Lives can be ruined

Most people don’t know that you can be locked up in a country you’ve never been to for a small amount of debt you owe in a country you don’t live in anymore. Most people with a Red Notice have no idea until they try to cross a border. But Brian’s story isn’t as unusual as it sounds.

About 20,000 Interpol notices are issued each year – acting as digital wanted posters which help police forces fight cross-border crime, and find fugitives. The notices are uploaded to a central database accessible to police in 195 countries.

When the notice system works, it helps capture people wanted for the most serious crimes: murder, drug trafficking, sexual exploitation, terrorism, money laundering. We don’t know exactly how many people are actually arrested on these notices each year, but data from 2016 suggests that the figure is in the low thousands.

When the system breaks down, it is vulnerable to abuse by authoritarian governments tracking dissidents, business people seeking leverage, powerful people settling scores, and even banks collecting debt.

According to the available data these are a small minority of all Red Notices.

But for each person the consequences can be devastating: families separated, businesses fallen apart, freedoms taken away.

In short, lives can be ruined.

The Uyghur activist

Zeynure Hasan hasn’t seen her husband, Idris, a Uyghur activist who lived in exile in Istanbul, for two years. The couple’s three children are growing up without their father.

“I am angry,” Zeynure told us. “My children ask every day: where is my dad?”

Idris is a computer scientist who spread the word about China’s treatment of his people. Human rights groups have called China’s treatment of Uyghurs a genocide. The Chinese authorities accused Idris of what they call “terrorism”.

He was arrested at an airport in Morocco, after China requested a Red Notice through Interpol. Although Interpol quickly cancelled the notice, admitting that it was in breach of its own rules against political, religious and racial persecution, it was too late. Idris was already in a Moroccan prison. Despite claiming asylum, he is still in prison and fighting against extradition to China.

“If the Moroccan government send me to China, this would be equal to death for me,” Idris told us on the phone from prison, where he’s in solitary confinement. “Maybe I am forever in prison. I cannot see my children and my family – forever.”

Authorities in China and Morocco were approached for comment.

Talking to Interpol

Interpol is a membership organisation for the world’s police forces. It was founded in the wake of the First World War, when the world powers came together to combat cross-border crime. As global travel has become easier, and technology more sophisticated, fighting international crime is harder than ever. Interpol will celebrate its 100th anniversary later this year, and the challenges it faces have never been greater.

“If a murderer is on the run, time matters. It’s a time-sensitive thing. Somebody can jump on a plane in a few hours, be somewhere else and commit the next crime. So we need to act fast,” says Interpol’s Secretary General, Jurgen Stock.

The Red Notice system is the cornerstone of Interpol’s toolkit. A police force in one country can issue a Red Notice request to Interpol for a fugitive. Interpol then pins that Red Notice to an internal message board visible to police around the world. Each country then acts on the information according to their own protocols. These can vary significantly. Some countries don’t generally act on them, others treat them as if they were arrest warrants.

Despite Interpol’s own guidelines saying that notices can’t be actioned if they have political, ethnic, military or religious intent, it’s clear that some of this nature are still getting through.

Stock took the helm in 2014 and will leave office next year. To combat abuses of Red Notices, he created a new task force to check them prior to circulation and beefed up the review council that investigates the worst cases. Stock sees his Red Notice reforms as defining his legacy.

But cases are still slipping through the net, and human rights lawyers and advocates claim the system is open to error and abuse.

In an interview at Interpol’s French headquarters, Stock described the Red Notice system as “very robust” but admitted it can break down, decrying every abuse as “one case too many”.

The organisation has improved its transparency under Jurgen Stock, but it is difficult to draw conclusions about the success of his reforms within the notice system from the available data.

The Secretary General isn’t willing to be drawn on the specifics of any individual cases, and won’t name the countries with the worst track records. Instead he points to the challenge of ensuring cooperation between countries with very different legal systems, who are sometimes locked in thorny diplomatic relations, and occasionally even at war with each other.

He also defends the Red Notice system as a whole, for its “unique capability” for catching the world’s most wanted international fugitives.

“The percentage of international-related organised crime and terrorism is increasing all around the world – that makes this a mechanism only Interpol can provide.”

‘I’ve lost my way’

Interpol’s limited public data shows that hundreds of people apply each year to have a Red Notice removed after encountering problems at international borders. In most of those cases, the notices are found to be non-compliant with Interpol’s rules. For example, in 2021, about 300 non-compliant notices were issued out of a total 24,000. A further 1,400 were weeded out before being published.

Experts like Ted Bromund, an Interpol historian, maintain that this figure only represents the tip of the iceberg. “If you see a cockroach on the floor of your kitchen and you stamp on it, what are the odds that there are no more cockroaches under the fridge, behind the range or in the walls?” he said.

Unlike many others, Brian’s nightmare did eventually end. He spent nine weeks in prison before striking a deal with the bank to get them to drop the notice. He had to pay more than £30,000, a sum far larger than the original debt. But he had a supportive family and assistance from the British government.

There are very few countries around the world where a relatively small amount of unpaid bank debt would result in imprisonment. But Interpol, inadvertently, provides the tools for countries to “export their justice system” abroad, according to Radha Sterling, an advocate who has helped the Glendinning family navigate his detention.

“Interpol is their bypass, it allows them to export their justice worldwide at the click of a button,” she told us.

Radha runs Detained in Dubai, an organisation that advocates for people detained abroad. Interpol notice cases are an increasing part of her workload. She has seen hundreds of clients‘ lives change beyond recognition.

“A lot of the time the Interpol notice is the punishment,” she says. “It’s a method of state harassment.”

Brian’s return home hasn’t been easy. It’s clear that his experience has shaken him deeply.

“I’ve lost my way,” he said in his first interview since returning from Iraq. “I had a plan, a route that I was going down. I’m wondering how to get back on that path.”

While he has returned to work, he feels a deep sense of dread at the thought of getting on a plane – even for a family holiday. “I’m always thinking, something bad is going to happen to me.”

For Brian, there are enduring questions.

“I just hope one day that I’ll wake up in the morning and I can’t even remember it. I just want it to go away,” he said.

“Will I ever get over it? Will I ever put it behind me?”

World

‘The drones are always there… like a punishment’: A diary of daily life in Gaza

Published

8 hours ago

August 31, 2025

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'The drones are always there... like a punishment': A diary of daily life in Gaza

“We call drones our loyal friends, because they never leave us.”

Tasneem hears Israeli drones overhead, a constant fact of life in Gaza. It gets into your head, into your chest, she says.

“You can’t think, you can’t sleep. You can’t even be.”

“It’s always there, hanging above our heads, like some kind of punishment,” she says. In the background, the slow, constant buzz of a drone is audible.

“The people here in Gaza know that when the drone gets very low, at this level, something will happen. We all know what that something is… I don’t want to mention it.”

Tasneem al Iwini is 24. Like her peers across the world, she splits her time between work, studying for a master’s degree and spending time with her family of six.

Except she also has to deal with warplanes screaming overhead, rocketing food prices and the possibility that any day could be the last for her or her loved ones as Israel continues its war in Gaza.

To give a sense of what day-to-day life is like for her in Deir al Balah, Tasneem recorded a series of audio diary entries over the course of a week as part of her work with ActionAid and shared them exclusively with Sky News.

Day One: At least I’m still breathing

It’s incredibly hot today, Tasneem says. The kind of heat that makes your skin heavy and your thoughts slower.

I had so many things to do on my plate today, but honestly, I couldn’t move.

There’s no electricity and no fans, no air conditioner. So here I am just laying on my mattress and sweating.

My only relief is my plastic tray. I’m just using it as my personal fan…

I keep waving it back and forth, not to cool the room, but just to trick my brain into thinking I have control over this heat.

Sometimes I close my eyes and imagine I’m somewhere cold, as I actually prefer winter.

But then I hear the buzz of flies and mosquitoes in my ear and I remember this is Gaza, summer 2025. It’s exhausting, but at least I’m still breathing.

Day Two: Rocketing price of food

It’s Friday, which is a special day for us as it is the day we usually wait to cook something special. Today we are cooking maqluba (a traditional dish consisting of meat, rice and fried vegetables).

We haven’t tasted any kind of real protein like meat, chicken or fish for more than three months. I really miss chicken and fish badly.

But even this fake maqluba costs a lot, so many families can’t afford it… vegetables are very expensive.

Before the war we used to cook maqluba with at least four kilos of eggplants, because we are crazy about eggplants and its taste in maqluba . Now, if we manage to cook it with only two eggplants, that’s considered a luxury.

The price of one kilo of eggplant is more than 45 shekels. That’s approximately $12.50. Talking about tomatoes, the price is more than 90 shekels, which is approximately $27 per kilo.

Day Three: The drone reality

Here we go again. Our dear friend, the drone, Tasneem says as a buzzing noise hums in the background.

It just never leaves. It’s always there hanging above our heads like some kind of punishment.

The sound, I don’t even know how to describe it.

It’s not just noise. It gets into your head, into your chest. You can’t think, you can’t sleep, you can’t even be.

It drains something inside you slowly, and yet we live with it every day.

Later on:

Hi again. I’m just recording the gunfire. We are not sure what is happening outside, actually.

I can say that this is almost an every afternoon routine.

Day Four: A message to the world

Today I came across a small community kitchen, one of the very few still functioning.

Because of the current situation, especially the scarcity of food and the near-total blockade on the humanitarian aid, most of these kitchens have shut down…

Tasneem says that just after she left the office, the community kitchen was hit in an Israeli strike.

Three youths were killed, and many children were injured.

Those children were playing around and nearby the kitchen…

This time I went to send a message to the world, with a heavy heart burdened by the challenges and the impossible conditions we live under.

I still hold on to hope that this war will end… Because honestly, here in Gaza, we have lost trust in the world, governments and every actor.

Day Five: How many children must die?

Good evening, dear friends. I don’t really know what to say. I feel like my heart is just a drain.

Yesterday I promised to take you through the rest of my day, but honestly, I came home feeling exhausted…

I bought just two cucumbers, and that cost me $8. Yes, $8 for two cucumbers.

This is what it means to say that even the basics have become impossible to get in Gaza.

I came home, washed the cucumbers and cut them into small pieces so all of us could taste what it feels like to eat cucumber.

Tomatoes are even worse. They are completely unaffordable in the market.

And every time I think about the situation we are living through here in Gaza, I feel like I’m out of patience. I just can’t take more.

How many of us have to die before the world decides to intervene? And how many children must die, not from bombing or shelling, but from starvation and malnutrition?

Today, the telecommunications company in Gaza announced that in the next 24 hours it is expected that internet services will shut down again because of the fuel shortage and because of the occupation, who continue to block fuel from entering the Strip.

And this does not mean losing the internet only. It means patients in the ICUs will lose connection to life. It means ambulances, fridges for medications and blood, even water pumps for both drinking and domestic use will stop working.

I was planning today to come home and study for my final exams, but I just sat there for a moment thinking about our reality.

And I couldn’t, I couldn’t do anything. So instead, I decided to record this for you. This is what Gaza looks like right now.

Day Seven: The cemetery is full… and the horror of jets overhead

There are many types of weapons being used… and here in Gaza, we the people have learned to genuinely distinguish between them.

We know each sound by heart.

For example, we know the sound of the F-16 (fighter jet) very well. We can even guess when it has a target.

It has a special tone, like it’s rushing towards something. There is a tension in the air, and we feel it in our bodies.

Whenever I hear one of them, I swear I feel like this is the last moment of my life. I cover my ears with both hands and run to stay nearby my family, because in this moment my heart tells me, if something happens, let it happen to all of us together.

I know that’s not how it works, but that’s how I cope. That’s the only way I feel some false sense of control…

Sometimes it feels like the pilot is showing off, flying lower over the heads of women, children and civilians, as if to say: “Look at me. I can do this.”

Every time the jets go low, I start praying, I do everything I can as if it is the end of my life.

In another voicenote from the same day, Tasneem talked about her walk to work.

I pass by the cemetery every day. Today, I saw a situation that truly broke my heart.

There was a group of angry people gathered around the person who is responsible for digging graves.

They were shouting, saying the cemetery is completely full, and now they have started opening all the graves without knowing who is buried there and without getting any consent from the families of the dead.

They are placing new dead bodies on the top of the old ones, whether they are men, women or children.

Most people were furious, and honestly, I was so disappointed and heartbroken when I saw this.

This is one of those things I wish I never had to witness, but I wanted to share it with you, because it says so much about how bad things have become.

‘Critical moment’ for Gaza

Tasneem works with the Palestinian NGOs Network in Gaza and has partnered with ActionAid in the UK.

A spokesperson for ActionAid UK said: “Humanitarian workers like Tasneem are risking their lives every day to support and advocate for their fellow Palestinians in Gaza, despite experiencing the same intolerable conditions that they are.

“Just imagine having to go to work when you haven’t had a proper meal in days, knowing that at any moment you could be killed by bombing: that is their daily reality. Yet still, people like Tasneem are bravely speaking out and telling their stories so that the world knows the truth about the horrors they are facing…

“This is a critical moment. It’s time for the world to take meaningful action and use every diplomatic lever available to bring about a permanent ceasefire and end the siege on Gaza immediately so that food and other aid can enter unhindered, rapidly and at scale.”

World

‘The drones are always there… like some sort of punishment’: Woman’s diary of daily life in Gaza

Published

17 hours ago

August 31, 2025

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