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GUANTÁNAMO BAY, Cuba — The U.S. army launched two brothers on Thursday who had been held as detainees within the struggle towards terrorism for serving to to function secure homes the place suspected operatives of Al Qaeda holed up after the Sept. 11, 2001, assaults.
The Pentagon stated that Mohammed Ahmed Ghulam Rabbani, 53, and Abdul Rahim Ghulam Rabbani, 55, who had been by no means charged with any crimes throughout 20 years in U.S. custody, had been flown to Pakistan in an association with authorities there.
The brothers had been captured by Pakistan’s safety providers in Karachi in September 2002. They arrived at Guantánamo Bay in 2004 after being stored at a C.I.A.-run detention web site in Afghanistan for about 550 days.
They had been permitted for switch in 2021. It’s unclear why that they had remained in jail. Within the interim, the Pentagon launched two different Pakistani prisoners. Saifullah Paracha, 75, was repatriated in October. Majid Khan, 42, was freed in Belize below a resettlement settlement this month.
The youthful Mr. Rabbani, who goes by Ahmed, had distinguished himself at Guantánamo as each a prolific artist and a decided starvation striker who survived on dietary dietary supplements, typically forcibly fed to him by means of a tube.
The Secretive World of Guantánamo Bay
- The Docket: Since 2002, roughly 780 detainees have been held on the American army jail in Cuba. Now, a couple of dozen stay.
- Landmark Instances: Three former Guantánamo prisoners who gained Supreme Courtroom circumstances which have formed the army’s skill to detain males on the jail are in the present day ensconced in household life. We caught up with two of them.
- A Excessive Value Tag: There are solely a handful of detainees at Guantánamo, and it prices $13 million a 12 months per prisoner to maintain them there.
- First Photographs: After 20 years of secrecy, The Occasions obtained secret Pentagon photographs of the primary prisoners dropped at Guantánamo Bay.
- A Look Inside: In 2019, our reporter and photographer took a four-day tour of the bottom and its jail. Right here’s what they noticed.
Earlier than Ahmed Rabbani’s launch, the Pentagon partially lifted a ban on the discharge of art work made by prisoners at Guantánamo. His legal professionals had been desirous to be taught if he had been allowed to take the greater than 100 work he had amassed in his years of detention with him on the army cargo aircraft that flew him and his brother to Pakistan.
Much less was recognized concerning the older brother. Agnieszka Fryszman, a lawyer who has represented him professional bono since 2006, instructed a parole board on the time that “he has stored himself busy with easy pursuits. He sweeps and cleans his block, for instance, and stays away from battle.”
The brothers are described in U.S. intelligence paperwork as Pakistanis by nationality, although they had been born and raised in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, and are ethnically Rohingya. Each had households in Karachi and had been working as part-time taxi drivers earlier than they had been seized.
As a result of they had been fluent in Arabic, that they had additionally discovered work operating errands and features of secure homes for the previous Qaeda operations chief Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who’s charged in a death-penalty case at Guantánamo because the accused mastermind of the Sept. 11 assaults.
In 2016, a U.S. army officer at Guantánamo instructed a parole-style evaluation board that Ahmed Rabbani “was a shrewd and crafty businessman and chased after the almighty greenback. He didn’t actually care to search out out who he was working with, however he stresses that he was working for cash, not for a spiritual trigger or an agenda.”
Clive Stafford Smith, a lawyer who has represented each males, stated Ahmed Rabbani was “very broken” from a seven-year starvation strike that started in early 2013 and “has a tough time holding meals down. However he’s getting higher on that entrance.”
“The irony is that in the present day, and all by means of his starvation strike, after they had been in communal residing, he would prepare dinner for the opposite males,” Mr. Stafford Smith stated, including that the youthful Mr. Rabbani desires to run a restaurant after he’s reunited along with his household.
Ahmed Rabbani’s title additionally got here up this week in hearings at Guantánamo over which proof is likely to be used within the trial of a prisoner who’s accused of plotting the Qaeda suicide assault on the united statesS. Cole destroyer off Yemen on Oct. 12, 2000.
Prosecutors stated they might wish to use what Mr. Rabbani instructed interrogators within the earliest days of his detention as rumour testimony within the case. Protection legal professionals stated Mr. Rabbani recanted these interrogations because the fruit of torture. There was no dialogue of calling him to court docket this week.
The brothers’ departure lowered the detainee inhabitants at Guantánamo Bay to 32 males, all despatched there throughout the years of the George W. Bush administration. Throughout the years, america has held about 780 detainees on the once-sprawling jail complicated. At its peak, in 2003, the army held 680 prisoners there at one time.
In an announcement asserting the discharge, the Pentagon thanked “the federal government of Pakistan and different companions to assist ongoing U.S. efforts targeted on responsibly lowering the detainee inhabitants and finally closing the Guantánamo Bay facility.”
Of those that stay, 18 have been provisionally permitted for launch or switch, if america can attain an settlement with a rustic keen to take them in. A number of of them may very well be repatriated, together with males from Algeria, Tunisia and Saudi Arabia. However the majority, largely Yemenis, want a brand new nation to obtain them as a result of Yemen, within the midst of a civil struggle, is taken into account too unstable and violent to watch their actions and assist them reintegrate into society.
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