04:22 PM EDT Aug 10 2004, Associated Press
MANAMA, Bahrain (AP) – A Bahraini human rights groups said Saturday at least two Bahrainis, including a member of the closely U.S.-allied Persian Gulf state’s royal family, being held at the U.S. navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have been tortured and abused.
The Bahrain Centre for Human Rights said the allegations were based on a report by three Britons and a phone call by an Arab prisoner freed recently from the U.S. detention camp.
The rights group’s president, Nabeel Rajab, identified the Bahrainis as Juma’a Mohammed al-Dossary and Sheik Salman bin Ebrahim bin Mohammed Al Khalifa.
04:22 PM EDT Aug 10 2004, Associated Press
MANAMA, Bahrain (AP) – A Bahraini human rights groups said Saturday at least two Bahrainis, including a member of the closely U.S.-allied Persian Gulf state’s royal family, being held at the U.S. navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have been tortured and abused.
The Bahrain Centre for Human Rights said the allegations were based on a report by three Britons and a phone call by an Arab prisoner freed recently from the U.S. detention camp.
The rights group’s president, Nabeel Rajab, identified the Bahrainis as Juma’a Mohammed al-Dossary and Sheik Salman bin Ebrahim bin Mohammed Al Khalifa.
Family members of both men, and four other Bahrainis detained in Guantanamo, said they were all performing humanitarian work in Pakistan when mercenaries from that country captured them and handed them over to U.S. forces, Rajab reported.
They were later sent to the detention facility in Cuba, where they are being held on suspicion of links to Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida terrorist network.
Rajab said he had spoken with the freed Arab prisoner, who reported Sheik Salman, a distant relative of Bahrain’s monarch, Sheik Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa, had been treated “very badly” in Guantanamo.
“He was being kept in the worst prison at the camp for being silent and considered unco-operative by” U.S. soldiers, Rajab said without elaborating.
Rajab, whose organization has become the regional centre for a U.S. rights group assisting detainees’ families from Afghanistan to Algeria, said he could not reveal the freed Arab prisoner’s identity because he faced possible retribution from his own government.
Citing information in a 155-page report released in New York City this week by lawyers for three British prisoners at Guantanamo, Rajab said evidence was released indicating the other Bahraini prisoner, al-Dossary, had been repeatedly beaten and kicked by U.S. soldiers.
The Foreign Ministry in Bahrain, a Gulf island that is home to the U.S. navy’s 5th Fleet, has asked its embassy in Washington to investigate if reports of al-Dossary having been tortured are true. The ministry has not heard of abuse claims against Sheik Salman.
On Aug.1, a U.S.-based human rights lawyer, Clive Stafford-Smith, left Bahrain with authorization from their families to file suits on behalf of 33 Arabs, including six Bahrainis, he believes are being unjustly detained at Guantanamo Bay.
Stafford-Smith’s New Orleans-based human rights group, Justice in Exile, began filing lawsuits after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled June 28 the Guantanamo detainees have a right to challenge their detention in civilian courts.
The U.S. Defence Department said the nearly 600 detainees could be deprived of normal legal rights because they are an exceptional security threat.