A. AND OTHERS v. THE UNITED KINGDOM JUDGMENT 21 5. The fifth applicant 43. The fifth applicant was born in Algeria in 1969. In his statement to SIAC he claimed to have developed polio as a child which left him with a permanently weak and paralysed right leg. He was arrested and tortured by the Algerian government in 1991, whereupon he left Algeria for Saudi Arabia. In 1992 he moved to Pakistan and travelled to Afghanistan on several occasions. In August 1995 he entered the United Kingdom and claimed asylum, alleging in the course of that claim that his leg had been injured by a shell in Afghanistan in 1994. His asylum claim was refused and his appeal against the refusal was dismissed in December 1999. The applicant married a French citizen and had a child with her. 44. He was certified by the Secretary of State under section 21 of the 2001 Act on 17 December 2001 and detained on 19 December 2001. In its judgment of 29 October 2003, dismissing the fifth applicant’s appeal against certification, SIAC observed: “The open statements provided to justify the certification do not refer to a great deal of source material and so consist mainly of assertions. As with most of these appeals, the main part of the evidence lies in closed material and so, as we are well aware, the Appellants have been at a disadvantage in that they have not been able to deal with what might be taken to be incriminating evidence. The Special Advocates have been able to challenge certain matters and sometimes to good effect. That indeed was the case in relation to a camp in Dorset attended by a number of those, including the Appellant, of interest to the Security Service. ... The case against the Appellant is that he was a member of the GIA and, since its split from the GIA, of the GSPC. He is associated with a number of leading extremists, some of whom are also members of or associated with the GSPC, and has provided active support in the form of the supply of false documents and facilitating young Muslims from the United Kingdom to travel to Afghanistan to train for jihad. He is regarded as having undertaken an important role in the support activities undertaken on behalf of the GSPC and other Islamic extremists in the United Kingdom and outside it. All this the Appellant denies and in his statement he gives innocent explanations for the associations alleged against him. He was indeed friendly with in particular other Algerians in the United Kingdom and, so far as [the fourth applicant] was concerned, the families were close because, apart from anything else, their respective wives were French. He attended [the eighth applicant’s] mosque. He was an impressive preacher and the Appellant says he listened but was never involved. Indeed he did not know [the eighth applicant] except through Chechen relief, which the Appellant and many hundreds of other Muslims supported, and he had never spoken to him on the telephone. He had on occasions approached [the eighth applicant] at Friday prayers at the mosque if he wanted guidance on some social problem.” SIAC referred to “open” surveillance reports which showed the applicant to have been in contact with other alleged members of GIA and GSPC, including at a camp in Dorset in July 1999. Further “open” evidence concerned his “unhelpful” and “not altogether truthful” responses to