US frees Guantánamo’s oldest prisoner, age 75
Former N.Y. resident released to Pakistan
GUANTÁNAMO BAY, Cuba — The United States has released the US military’s oldest prisoner of the war on terror, a 75-year-old businessman who had been held for nearly two decades as a suspected sympathizer of Al Qaeda but was never charged with a crime.
Saifullah Paracha, a former legal resident of New York, was one of Guantánamo’s most unusual and better known “forever prisoners.” Military prosecutors never sought to put him on trial, but review panels considered him too dangerous to release until last year.
His transfer, in a secret military mission announced by the Pakistani government on Saturday, culminated months of negotiations to arrange his return. The Pentagon declined to comment. It was not known if Biden administration officials imposed any security restrictions on Paracha, but a lawyer swiftly released a photo of the former prisoner sitting in a McDonald’s in Karachi.
Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement on Saturday that it had “completed an extensive interagency process to facilitate repatriation of Paracha” and that it was “glad that a Pakistani citizen detained abroad is finally reunited with his family.”
Just before he left, the 21st commander of prison operations, a National Guard general from Michigan, had taken charge and the detainee population had dwindled to three dozen. Of them, 21 have been approved for transfer to the custody of another country with security arrangements that satisfy the secretary of defense; for example, participation in a rehabilitation program.
At Guantánamo, Paracha stood out among the predominantly younger Muslim men, most of whom were captured in their teens and 20s by Afghan or Pakistani militias and turned over to the United States as presumptive foot soldiers of Al Qaeda or the Taliban.
He was captured in July 2003 at age 56 in an FBI sting operation in Thailand. Businessmen posing as Kmart representatives lured him from his home in Karachi to Bangkok to discuss what turned out to be a bogus merchandising deal. Instead, intelligence agents seized, hooded, and shackled him and flew him to Afghanistan.
Paracha was held first at a US military prison in Bagram, Afghanistan, where he had a heart attack, his lawyers said. Rather than send him to the secret prison network run by the CIA, where prisoners were tortured, the Bush administration moved him to Guantánamo in his 14th month of US detention.
“Saifullah should never have been in Guantánamo,” said Clive Stafford Smith, a human rights lawyer who has been visiting him at the prison since 2005. “Because he was the oldest person there, I constantly feared he would have his fourth heart attack and die there. So I am so happy that he is finally going home.”
In his file, US intelligence agencies said he had helped Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the accused mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, “facilitate financial transactions and propaganda” after the attacks, and said he met with Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan before the attacks as part of a delegation of Pakistani dignitaries.
For his part, Paracha claimed in an unsuccessful federal court petition for his release that he did not know Mohammed’s true identity or his role in the Sept. 11 plot. He said he held some money for him and allowed Mohammed’s nephew to use an editing studio in Karachi out of a sense of Muslim kinship, not ideology, and he denounced violence and denied affiliation with Al Qaeda.
Months before he was captured, federal agents took Paracha’s eldest son, Uzair, into custody in New York, where he was living. He was tried, convicted, and sentenced to 30 years in prison for providing material support to terrorism.
But Uzair Paracha’s conviction was overturned in 2018. Then in 2020, prosecutors dropped the case against him. He was returned to Pakistan after agreeing to relinquish his status as a permanent resident of the United States.
The elder Paracha, who is fluent in English, had lived in Queens in the 1970s, obtained a green card in 1980, and operated businesses in Pakistan and the New York metropolitan region, including travel agencies, a real estate business, and a media production firm.
At Guantánamo, inmates and some guards called him “chacha,” a term of endearment that means uncle in Urdu. When the prison leadership allowed, he tutored younger prisoners in English and finance. At times he brought cellblock complaints to the guards.
His wife, whom he met and married in the United States, divorced him while he was in custody. He was expected to live with his youngest son, Mustafa, who said in an interview last year that the first order of business would be a family reunion, followed by comprehensive medical care.