It's been a harrowing journey: from repression in China to war in Afghanistan and four long years at Guantanamo Bay as a US captive in the war on terror.
Adel Abdu al-Hakim hopes it ends here, in his sister's apartment in a suburb of the Swedish capital.
"I was in prison for four-and-a-half years and during that time I thought to myself that maybe this is my life," al-Hakim, 33, said in an interview. "Now I just want to live the life of a normal person."
Last week he arrived in Sweden for a reunion with relatives he had thought he would never see again.
Al-Hakim was released last year from Guantanamo along with four other Uighurs, a minority group of Turkic-speaking Chinese Muslims, after the US admitted they were not terrorists. Authorities believed they might face persecution if returned to China, so they were sent instead to Albania, the only other country that would receive them.
But they found themselves isolated and jobless in a nation where no one spoke their language.
Al-Hakim accepted an invitation to attend a human rights conference in Sweden, where his sister sought shelter in 2002. He applied for asylum on Tuesday last week after arriving on a four-day visa.
The chances for approval were uncertain because the case is unique in Sweden. Al-Hakim will likely be allowed to stay in the country pending a decision, although authorities could deport him immediately if they determine his case has no merit.
"We have fought for a very long time and now we are very happy to be together," he said, surrounded by his sister Kavser and her daughters in the apartment just outside Stockholm.
Calmly, al-Hakim recalled the tumultuous decade that brought him here.
He left China in 1999, fed up with harassment and discrimination by Chinese authorities. Two years earlier, he said, he had been detained and beaten after attending a demonstration against the mistreatment of Uighurs in his hometown.
Critics accuse China of using claims of terrorism as an excuse to crack down on peaceful pro-independence sentiment among Uighurs.
After spending his first year as a refugee in Kyrgyzstan, al-Hakim and fellow Uighur Abu Bakker Qassim decided to move to Turkey.
Their trip took them through Pakistan and Afghanistan -- clearly an unsafe destination in the fall of 2001 as the US launched its campaign against the Taliban.
As bombs fell on a small Afghan mountain village where they had joined other Uighurs, they fled to Pakistan -- only to be detained and handed over to US authorities for US$5,000 each, he said.
"It was all about money," al-Hakim said.
Shackled and hooded, they were transferred to a prison camp in Kandahar, Afghanistan, where they spent six months before being moved to Guantanamo. At that point, the US already knew they were not terrorists, al-Hakim said.
"In the last interrogation in Afghanistan, the Americans acknowledged that they had arrested us by mistake, but said they could not let us go so easily," he said.
The formal acknowledgment of this mistake came only after a lengthy legal battle when a military tribunal ruled al-Hakim and other Uighurs were not enemy combatants.
"Of course I was angry. I tried to hide my emotions but I still cried a lot," al-Hakim said.
Beijing wanted the Uighur detainees sent back to China, saying they were part of a violent Muslim separatist movement fighting for an independent state of "East Turkistan."
US authorities resisted, but declined to let them into the country. Appeals went out to third countries for shelter, but all were rejected before Albania, a small ex-communist country, said yes.
Lawyers in the US and Sweden as well as human rights groups helped al-Hakim obtain his four-day visa for Sweden.
As he waits for his asylum decision, the joy of being reunited with his sister and her family is tempered by the absence of his own wife and children, who still live in China.
"I don't have the possibility to get them from over there. The Chinese authorities won't allow it," he said. "My children keep asking when I will come back ... why I don't want to come and get them, why all children have fathers and they don't."
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion