US authorities have recommended releasing a mentally ill inmate from Guantanamo Bay and repatriating him to Saudi Arabia, US a government document published on Friday said.
Suspected of being al-Qaeda’s intended 20th hijacker for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks against the US, Mohammed al-Qahtani was tortured by interrogators at the US military base in Cuba, where he has been detained for nearly two decades.
The government dropped the case against him in 2008, acknowledging the abuse he experienced at the prison camp.
Photo: AFP
The detention of al-Qahtani is “no longer necessary to protect against a continuing significant threat to the security of the United States,” the US Periodic Review Board, a panel composed of several US national security agencies, said in a summary of its decision.
In its final determination, dated Friday, the board said that al-Qahtani was “eligible for transfer” and recommended that he be repatriated to Saudi Arabia, where he could receive comprehensive mental healthcare and be enrolled in a rehabilitation center for extremists.
The body noted his “significantly compromised mental health condition and available family support.”
Security measures, including surveillance and travel restrictions, were also recommended.
Al-Qahtani was one of the first prisoners sent to Guantanamo in January 2002.
He had flown to Orlando, Florida, on Aug. 4, 2001, but was denied entry to the country and sent back to Dubai, United Arab Emirates.
He was eventually captured in Afghanistan in December 2001.
His torture at the prison was widely documented and spurred on international human rights groups’ calls for the site to be shut down.
He was subjected to prolonged isolation, sleep deprivation, sexual humiliation and other abuses.
“We tortured Qahtani,” former US Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces judge Susan Crawford said in 2009, according to a Washington Post article.
Last month, the US approved the release of five of the remaining 39 men still at Guantanamo.
Ten others, including the alleged mastermind of the 2001 attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, are awaiting trial by a military commission.
The detention center, run by the US Navy, was created after the 2001 attacks to house detainees in the US “war on terror” and has been called a site of “unparalleled notoriety” by UN rights experts.
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