Set me free so I won’t miss my daughter’s 18th birthday
Last Briton in Guantanamo Bay appeals for immediate release
THE last Briton being held in Guantanamo Bay has pleaded to be allowed back to the UK four days early – so he can be with his daughter when she celebrates her 18th birthday on Tuesday.
The US agreed last month to release Shaker Aamer from the notorious detention camp, where he has been held for nearly 14 years and claims to have been tortured.
But Congress had to be given 30 days to consider the decision, so officially he is not due for release until next Saturday at the earliest.
However, Mr Aamer, 46, who last saw A-level pupil Johina when she was four, appealed for the rules to be relaxed.
‘I know the 30 days will not be up until October 24, but come on,’ he said during an emotional six-hour meeting with his lawyers, the first time he has spoken publicly since being told the US government had sanctioned his release.
‘If everybody is already content to let me go, then why can’t you release me for the end of my daughter’s childhood?’
The father of four met his legal team from the human rights organisation Reprieve last week. Yesterday, when notes of their conversation had been cleared by US censors, the Daily Mail was given exclusive access to the transcript.
Mr Aamer, who has been diagnosed with physical and psychological ailments, said: ‘The very first thing I want is a cup of coffee, then for a doctor to look me over.
‘And then I want to talk to my wife. Alone. I need her to tell me what the kids are like, after so long. Only she knows this. I can’t know.
‘And she is the one who has suffered the most, with me, because ... she has had to carry on for so long. I need to find out from her everything that has happened in the years I have been away. Everything I’ve missed. Right after that I want to see the kids as soon as possible. I was hoping to get my daughter a present for her 18th birthday.’ His lawyer Cori Crider, who led the Reprieve team, said Mr Aamer seemed more optimistic than at any time during the eight years she has been visiting him. He also expressed deep gratitude to the Daily Mail and others who have secured his release. The campaign had moved him to tears, he said – and he smiled broadly when she handed him a copy of the Mail’s front-page report headlined: ‘Justice at last’. ‘He said he was taken aback because he felt he was a “nobody”,’ she said.
Mr Aamer knows returning to his three-bedroomed house in Battersea, South London, after so many years spent largely in solitary confinement in an 8ft by 12ft cell will not be easy. Reprieve will offer him help to readjust. However, according to his father-in-law Saeed Siddique, life has changed so much that nothing can fully prepare him. His wife Zin, 40, has bouts of depression caused by his captivity; his three oldest children, Johina, Michel, 16, and Said, 15, are now modern London teenagers, whose world will be totally alien to him; and he has never met his son Faris, 13, who was born on the day he arrived in Guantanamo: Valentine’s Day, 2002.
As the Daily Mail has stated repeatedly, there is no telling if Mr Aamer is innocent or not. It might be true, as he maintains, that he had been in Afghanistan to set up a charitable school in December 2001 when villagers captured him and handed him to the Americans for bounty money. It might equally be the case that he travelled there to wage terrorist warfare on the West, as the US authorities insist. Either way, the US has failed to grant him the right to be tried before a court of law.
Today, after years of hungerstriking, Mr Aamer is frail and gaunt, with streaks of grey in his beard.
He is determined to get as fit as possible before returning to his family, however, so his lawyers took him healthy foods, two copies of Men’s Health magazine – and a bottle of Pantene Pro V shampoo for his frizzy, shoulder-length hair.