Missing ex-Gitmo inmate ‘reappears’ in Venezuela
US board declines to free ‘hijacker’
MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay, July 28, (AP): A resettled former Guantanamo prisoner who disappeared last month in Uruguay, setting off alarm bells in neighboring countries and recriminations in Washington, has reappeared in Venezuela, the government said Wednesday.
Foreign Minister Rodolfo Nin Novoa told The Associated Press that Syrian native Abu Wa’el Dhiab showed up at Uruguay’s consulate in Caracas. Consulate officials refused to provide information or entry to AP journalists gathered outside.
Late Thursday, the Foreign Ministry issued a statement saying Dhiab told the consulate he wanted to move to Turkey or another country where he could reunite with his family.
“He expressed clearly that in no case was he interested in returning to Uruguay, but required the assistance of our country for his proposal,” the statement said.
Dhiab, who has repeatedly expressed his unhappiness at his life in Uruguay, previously accused the government of breaking its commitment to bring his family.
He is one of six former Guantanamo prisoners who were resettled in Uruguay after being released by US authorities in 2014, invited by then President Jose Mujica as a humanitarian gesture.
The men had been detained in 2002 for suspected ties to Alqaeda. They were held without charge like hundreds of others at Guantanamo before the US government cleared them for release. There are no charges against Dhiab or order for his arrest, and Uruguayan officials had said that as a refugee he has the right to leave the South American country.
Dhiab had last been reported seen in Chuy, a small city on the Uruguay-Brazil border that is home to an Arab community. Residents said he visited the makeshift mosque of the local Arab club where he prayed and slept before he was reported missing.
His disappearance raised concerns, as well as questions about how closely countries that resettle former Guantanamo inmates should watch them and for how long, as the United States prepares to release more prisoners.
Concerns
US lawmakers trying to block President Barack Obama from closing the detention center recently scolded his administration for losing track of Dhiab. The US envoy in Montevideo also expressed concerns about the lack of information on his whereabouts. Ambassador Kelly Keiderling said it was up to Uruguay to say whether Dhiab can travel, though she added that she would prefer he stay in Uruguay. When questioned at a news conference, she said Dhiab “could be, yes, theoretically,” a threat.
Colombia-based Avianca Airlines recently issued an internal alert saying Dhiab could be using a fake passport trying to enter Brazil, the site of the summer Olympics. The airline said the alert was issued based on information provided by Brazil’s federal police, which had been looking for Dhiab.
The Uruguayan government has provided social services and financial support to Dhiab and the five other former detainees — three others from Syria, a Tunisian and a Palestinian. But the men have struggled to adjust and have complained about not getting enough help from Uruguayan officials.
Dhiab was the most vocal about his unhappiness. Last year, he visited neighboring Argentina. In an orange jumpsuit like those Guantanamo prisoners have worn, he told news media in Buenos Aires that he planned to seek asylum for himself and the other detainees still held at the US naval base in eastern Cuba.
In an interview with the Uruguayan magazine Busqueda, Dhiab said he was never a terrorist, but sympathizes with Alqaeda because of the torture that he endured in Guantanamo.
Jon Eisenberg, a US lawyer who represented Dhiab while he was detained at Guantanamo, said he had not been in contact with the former prisoner since a phone call in June.
Eisenberg said Dhiab was very concerned about his wife and three children, who fled the Syrian civil war for Turkey but then had to return to their homeland for financial reasons. They were in a Syrian village that was bombed by government forces in November 2015.
The lawyer said that when he last spoke with the former prisoner, Dhiab was hopeful that his family might be brought to Uruguay.
“That’s why I thought he wouldn’t leave Uruguay,” Eisenberg said.
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MIAMI: A board reviewing the status of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay has decided against releasing a Saudi who US authorities believe narrowly avoided becoming one of the hijackers in the Sept 11, 2001, terrorist attack.
Lawyers for prisoner Mohammed al-Qahtani asked the Periodic Review Board last month to send the prisoner to a rehabilitation center in Saudi Arabia for treatment of severe mental illness. The board, made up of representatives of six government agencies, turned down the request in a statement released Wednesday.
The board cited several reasons for its decision, including the fact that al-Qahtani “almost certainly” had been chosen by senior al-Qaeda members to be the 20th hijacker in the Sept 11 plot and his “refusal to respond to questions” about his past activities.
Al-Qahtani tried to enter the US before the Sept 11 attack but was turned away by immigration officers at the airport in Orlando, Florida. The suicide attack went ahead with 19 hijackers, killing nearly 3,000 people in New York, Pennsylvania and Washington. He was captured in Afghanistan and in February 2002 taken to the US base in Cuba, where he was subjected to brutal interrogation that a senior Pentagon legal official later said amounted to torture.
The US charged al-Qahtani before a military tribunal along with five other prisoners with war crimes for the Sept. 11 attack. But the charges against him were withdrawn because of his treatment at Guantanamo. The case against the others has been proceeding slowly at the base but no trial date has been set.
Lawyers for al-Qahtani, 41, told the review board that long before he was taken into US custody he suffered psychiatric disabilities that included schizophrenia, major depression and possibly neurocognitive disorder due to a traumatic brain injury sustained in a car accident when he was 8.
One of his lawyers, Shane Kadidal of the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York, said they would not allow members of the board to question Alqahtani about his past because of his mental illness and made that clear to the board.