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Yemeni spy held at Guantanamo, rights group says

A Yemeni intelligence officer was abducted in Egypt's capital nearly three years ago and handed over to US authorities who held him incommunicado for more than a year before sending him to the Guantanamo detention camp, a rights group said Wednesday.

Human Rights Watch said the case is significant because it is a new example of what rights groups call "reverse rendition," where foreign governments detain terror suspects in non-combat situations and transfer them to US military custody. In the rendition process, right groups allege the US government transfers detainees in its custody to foreign governments for interrogation.

Abd al-Salam Ali al-Hila, a Yemeni intelligence colonel and businessman, was seized on a Cairo street by Egyptian authorities on Sept. 19, 2002, while he was on a business trip, the New York-based rights group said, citing Yemeni authorities and al-Hila's brother.

He was taken within 10 days to Azerbaijan then to the Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan and finally to the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba in mid-2004, Human Rights Watch said.

The US government "continues to believe that by invoking the word `terror' it can detain anyone in any corner of the world without any oversight," Human Rights Watch researcher John Sifton was quoted as saying in a statement. "Turning your back on the law is not the way to stop terrorism."

Pentagon spokesman Major Michael Shavers said it is the US military's policy not to discuss the cases of individual detainees, but he denied that the military takes part in renditions. "We do not engage in the practice of renditions," Shavers said Wednesday.

An Egyptian Interior Ministry official, who declined to be named, said he had never heard of the case of the Yemeni.

The CIA is thought to have coined the term rendition and it refers to the practice of secretly shuttling captured suspects thought to be enemies of the US from one country to another for the purposes of detention or interrogation.

Prior to being detained, al-Hila had been in daily contact with his family including three children in Yemen, the rights groups said. The family did not hear from him again until April last year.

A letter al-Hila wrote was smuggled out of Afghanistan and it was released by Yemeni authorities in April last year, Human Rights Watch said. Al-Hila sent subsequent letters to his family from Afghanistan through the International Committee of the Red Cross and most recently from Guantanamo.

Human Rights Watch said al-Hila's case is not unique and other detainees captured outside Afghanistan in non-combat situations have been brought to Guantanamo without criminal law protections. The group said that six Algerians held in Bosnia were transferred to US officials in January 2002 and were sent to Guantanamo.

Some 540 prisoners from 40 countries are being held at Guantanamo and they are suspected of having links to al-Qaeda terror network or the ousted Taliban regime in Afghanistan.

Human rights groups and defense lawyers have long criticized the US detention mission at Guantanamo.
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