WASHINGTON, Oct 18 — The Pentagon yesterday announced that it had repatriated a prominent Guantánamo detainee who wrote a best-selling memoir recounting his abuse by US interrogators.
The transfer reduced the remaining detainee population to 60.
The ex-detainee, Mohamedou Ould Slahi, 45, was transferredyesterday to his native Mauritania, officials said.
A parole-like review panel of six agencies had recommended his transfer in July, citing his “highly compliant behaviour in detention” and “clear indications of a change in the detainee’s mindset”.
“I feel grateful and indebted to the people who have stood by me,” Slahi said in a statement released by the American Civil Liberties Union, which helped to represent him.
“I have come to learn that goodness is transnational, transcultural and transethnic. I’m thrilled to reunite with my family.”
Born in Mauritania, Slahi studied electrical engineering in Germany and then joined al-Qaeda in the early 1990s, a time when Osama bin Laden’s mujahedeen fighters were helping the anti-Communist resistance in Afghanistan, backed by the United States, after the Soviet invasion.
He eventually returned to Germany and later crossed paths with one of the accused plotters of the September 11, 2001, attacks.
By the time of those attacks, Slahi was back in Mauritania.
He was arrested and sent to Jordan, which later transferred him to the custody of the United States.
Taken to Guantánamo Bay, Slahi was subjected in 2003 to a special interrogation approved by then-Defence Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.
Slahi wrote of sleep deprivation, beatings, dousings with ice water and being shackled for days in a freezing cell.
But he denied involvement with terrorism and was never charged with a crime.
He wrote a memoir by hand about that period, and his lawyers fought for years for permission to have it published. After it appeared, with many redactions, under the title Guantánamo Diary in 2015, it became a best seller and was optioned for a movie.
At his parole-like hearing in June, a representative said Slahi wanted to start a business and write books.
In deciding to release him, the panel also cited “the extensive support network available to the detainee from multiple sources, including strong family connections, and the detainee’s robust and realistic plan for the future”. — The New York Times
