Government to appeal Algerian pilot ruling

The government said on Wednesday it would appeal against a ruling ordering it to consider compensation for an Algerian pilot who spent five months in jail wrongly accused of training September11 hijackers.

Lotfi Raissi, 33, was arrested in London 10 days after the September 11, 2001, attacks and held at the high-security Belmarsh prison in the southeast of the capital.

Raissi won the right to claim compensation from the British government in a legal ruling earlier this month.

Even though the allegations against him were proved false, Raissi says he is now blacklisted from all airline jobs and his life has been ruined.

"We are appealing on a point of law/principle about boundaries of the state compensation scheme," said a spokeswoman for the Ministry of Justice.

"We need to clarify how far government compensation goes."

The British government rejected a claim for compensation lodged by Raissi in 2004.

But in a ruling on February 14 the Court of Appeal in London ordered the government to reconsider the compensation claim, saying that the way extradition proceedings and refusals of bail had been conducted were "an abuse of process".

The United States had argued Raissi was linked to Hani Hanjour, the pilot suspected of crashing a passenger plane into the Pentagon in Washington.

It had sought to extradite Raissi on two counts of falsifying an application for a U.S. pilot's licence, but a British court dismissed the charges in 2002.