U.S. Sends Home Brothers Held for Nearly 20 Years at Guantánamo Bay

GUANTÁNAMO BAY, Cuba — The U.S. navy launched two brothers on Thursday who had been held as detainees within the struggle in opposition to terrorism for serving to to function protected homes the place suspected operatives of Al Qaeda holed up after the Sept. 11, 2001, assaults, in accordance with two U.S. officers.

Mohammed Ahmed Ghulam Rabbani, 53, and Abdul Rahim Ghulam Rabbani, 55, who have been by no means charged with any crimes throughout 20 years in U.S. custody, have been flown to Pakistan in an association with authorities there.

The brothers have been captured by Pakistan’s safety providers in Karachi in September 2002. They arrived at Guantánamo Bay in 2004 after being saved at a C.I.A.-run detention website in Afghanistan for about 550 days.

They have been accredited for switch in 2021. It’s unclear why that they had remained in jail. Within the interim, the Pentagon launched two different Pakistani prisoners. Saifullah Paracha, 75, was repatriated in October. Majid Khan, 42, was freed in Belize underneath a resettlement settlement this month.

The youthful Mr. Rabbani, who goes by Ahmed, had distinguished himself at Guantánamo as each a prolific artist and a decided starvation striker who survived on dietary dietary supplements, generally forcibly fed to him by way of a tube.

Earlier than Ahmed Rabbani’s launch, the Pentagon partially lifted a ban on the discharge of art work made by prisoners at Guantánamo. His attorneys have been wanting to study if he had been allowed to take the greater than 100 work he had amassed in his years of detention with him on the navy cargo aircraft that flew him and his brother to Pakistan.

Much less was recognized concerning the older brother. Agnieszka Fryszman, a lawyer who has represented him professional bono since 2006, instructed a parole board on the time that “he has saved himself busy with easy pursuits. He sweeps and cleans his block, for instance, and stays away from battle.”

The brothers are described in U.S. intelligence paperwork as Pakistanis by nationality, although they have been born and raised in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, and are ethnically Rohingya. Each had households in Karachi and have been working as part-time taxi drivers earlier than they have been seized.

As a result of they have been fluent in Arabic, that they had additionally discovered work working errands and elements of protected homes for the previous Qaeda operations chief Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who’s charged in a death-penalty case at Guantánamo because the accused mastermind of the Sept. 11 assaults.

In 2016, a U.S. navy officer at Guantánamo instructed a parole-style overview board that Ahmed Rabbani “was a shrewd and crafty businessman and chased after the almighty greenback. He didn’t actually care to seek out out who he was working with, however he stresses that he was working for cash, not for a non secular trigger or an agenda.”

Clive Stafford Smith, a lawyer who has represented each males, stated Ahmed Rabbani was “very broken” from a seven-year starvation strike that started in early 2013 and “has a tough time holding meals down. However he’s getting higher on that entrance.”

“The irony is that immediately, and all by way of his starvation strike, once they have been in communal dwelling, he would prepare dinner for the opposite males,” Mr. Stafford Smith stated, including that the youthful Mr. Rabbani desires to run a restaurant after he’s reunited together with his household.

Ahmed Rabbani’s title additionally got here up this week in hearings at Guantánamo over which proof may be used within the trial of a prisoner who’s accused of plotting the Qaeda suicide assault U.S.S. Cole destroyer off Yemen on Oct. 12, 2000.

Prosecutors stated they could wish to use what Mr. Rabbani instructed interrogators within the earliest days of his detention as rumour testimony within the case. Protection attorneys stated Mr. Rabbani recanted these interrogations because the fruit of torture. There was no dialogue of calling him to court docket this week.

Each U.S. officers spoke on the situation of anonymity as a result of they weren’t approved to talk publicly. However they stated the switch was accomplished by Thursday afternoon.

The brothers’ departure diminished the detainee inhabitants at Guantánamo Bay to 32 males, all despatched there in the course of the years of the George W. Bush administration. Throughout the years, america has held about 780 detainees on the once-sprawling jail advanced. At its peak, in 2003, the navy held 680 prisoners there at one time.

Of those that stay, 18 have been provisionally accredited for launch or switch, if america can attain an settlement with a rustic keen to take them in. A number of of them may very well be repatriated, together with males from Algeria, Libya, Tunisia and Saudi Arabia. However the majority, largely Yemenis, want a brand new nation to obtain them as a result of Yemen, within the midst of a civil struggle, is taken into account too unstable and violent to watch their actions and assist them reintegrate into society.