A Saudi charged with being part of an al-Qaeda bomb-making cell was set to appear yesterday before a US military tribunal in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, on evidence that his military defense attorney says was obtained through torture.
Jabran Said bin al-Qahtani, an electrical engineer captured at an al-Qaeda safe house in Pakistan in March 2002, was trained by the militant network to make small handheld remote detonators of a kind later used in improvised devices against US forces in Afghanistan, the US military says.
A military charge sheet says Qahtani wrote two instruction manuals on how to assemble circuit boards that could be used as timing devices for bombs and was preparing to join the fight against US troops when Pakistani forces captured him and two alleged co-conspirators in the Pakistani city of Faisalabad.
The three men -- Qahtani, Algerian Sufyian Barhoumi and Saudi Ghassan Abdullah al-Sharbi -- are scheduled to appear separately before the tribunal for pretrial hearings this week.
They are among only 10 out of 490 detainees in the Guantanamo Bay prison camp who have been charged with war crimes before the tribunals, known formally as commissions.
All of those charged so far face life in prison if convicted.
Qahtani was to make his first appearance before the tribunal yesterday for what his military attorney, Army Lieutenant Colonel Bryan Broyles, said would be an uneventful proceeding.
But Broyles is preparing to challenge the case against his client under a Department of Defense directive that formally instructs tribunals to prohibit the use of evidence found to result from torture.
"I believe there's torture-related evidence in the prosecution's case against my client," he told reporters without elaborating.
Air Force Colonel Morris Davis, the chief prosecutor, said a ruling on suspect evidence would be eligible for appeals ranging from special review boards to the US Supreme Court.
"I would think that in those seven layers, there's pretty good protection," he said.
Davis added that the military was developing charges in two dozen more cases against Guantanamo prisoners, including some that could draw the death penalty.
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