Portrayed as a photojournalist for The Sunday Times, Paul Conroy, who has recently escaped from the Islamic Emirate of Baba Amr, is a British MI6 agent.
In this photo, he can be seen in Libya (in blue bulletproof vest) with, on the right, Al-Qaeda leaders Mahdi al-Harati (in black body armor) and Abdelhakim Belhaj (in camouflaged jacket).
• Mahdi al-Harati married an Irish woman and lived in Dublin. Paul Conroy is from Northern Ireland and was raised in Liverpool.
According to former Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar, Mahdi al-Harati is still wanted in Spain for his involvement in the Madrid bombings of March 11, 2004.
In 2010, with a well-groomed beard and an NGO cover, Mahdi al-Harati was planted by MI6 in the "Freedom Flotilla," which was on a mission to deliver humanitarian aid to Gaza.
Mahdi al-Harati led the Al Qaeda brigade who besieged the Rixos Hotel in Tripoli in August 2011. According to Khamis Gaddafi, he was overseen by French instructors. According to a high-level foreign military source, NATO had given al-Harati the assignment of capturing the Libyan leaders who sheltered in a secret facility of the hotel, and of murdering former congressman and Martin Luther King assistant, Walter Fauntroy, who was staying in the hotel. He was also to eliminate two Voltaire Network collaborators, Thierry Meyssan and Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya, who were based at the Radisson Hotel, whence al-Harati operated his torture center. This decision had been made at a meeting restricted to the NATO command in Naples a few days earlier. The meeting minutes mentioned the presence of Alain Juppé. When questioned, his secretariat denied any involvement by the French Foreign Minister, saying that he was on vacation at that time.
In October 2011, Mahdi al-Harati organized a model village in Syria located in the mountains on the Turkish border. For two months, he hosted Western reporters singing them the praises of the Syrian "revolution." The village is inhabited by a tribe that was paid to stage demonstrations and pose for the press. Al-Harati was visited in particular by Paul Moreira of Canal Plus and Edith Bouvier of Le Figaro.
• Abdel Hakim Belhaj is Ayman al-Zawahiri’s right-hand man, and currently Al Qaeda’s number two commander. Although officially still one of most wanted criminals in the world, NATO named him military governor of Tripoli.
Abdel Hakim Belhaj holds a Qatar residence permit.
Abdel Hakim Belhaj has recently made several trips to Turkey, where he was given an office on the NATO base at Incirlik, and to Syria where he built up several groups comprising up to 1,500 combatants. According to Ayman al-Zawahiri, it was his men who perpetrated the attacks in Damascus and Aleppo.
His organization, the Islamic Fighting Group in Libya, has merged with Al-Qaeda but still figures on the terrorist list of the U.S. State Department and the British Home Office.
By associating with renowned terrorists, Conroy falls within the scope of the law of both in United States and Great Britain for complicity or association with a terrorist group. He faces 15 years in prison, unless he pleads immunity as an agent of the Crown.