RIYADH, 18 June 2004 — A Saudi citizen has been freed from Iraq’s infamous Abu Ghraib prison after 10 months in detention without charge and will be heading home shortly, local newspapers reported yesterday.
Khaled Al-Kayssum was part of a group of around 100 detainees ferried by bus from the prison outside Baghdad to the northern Iraqi city of Mosul on Monday night and freed there, Okaz reported, quoting his brother Ali.
He was given 48 hours to leave Iraq, it said.
Al-Yaum quoted Kayssum as saying by telephone that US occupation forces had returned his passport and that he was leaving Iraq last night.
The paper said he declined to talk about his ordeal at Abu Ghraib, saying he would do so once he was back in Saudi Arabia.
Local newspapers have regularly carried stories about Saudis detained in Abu Ghraib, especially since the breakout in April of the scandal over the abuse of prisoners held there by US troops.
Numbers have varied slightly. Al-Yaum said that Kayssum’s release left 14 Saudi families still waiting for their sons to be freed from jail in Iraq.
Meanwhile, it was reported that a Saudi belonging to a group headed by suspected Al- Qaeda operative Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi carried out Monday’s suicide bombing in Iraq that killed 13 people, the man’s brother was quoted by Reuters as saying yesterday.
Khaled Al-Shimri told Reuters by telephone that his brother Abdullah had been in Iraq for almost two months before the attack, in which five foreign contractors were among the dead.
“I believe he belonged to Jamaat Al-Tawhid and Jihad,” Shimri said. “We received news of his death in Monday’s operation in Iraq.”
Jamaat Al-Tawhid and Jihad claimed responsibility for the blast, which devastated a busy Baghdad street, in a statement posted on a Website on Tuesday.
The five foreign contractors that were killed included two Britons, a Frenchman and an American.
They were employees of a subsidiary of the US conglomerate General Electric or security contractors working with the company.
Zarqawi’s group has claimed responsibility for many of the recent attacks in Iraq.
This week, Websites said a Kuwaiti militant, believed to belong Jama’at Al-Tawhid, had also been killed in an attack in Iraq on Saturday.
A Kuwaiti security source told Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper, a sister publication of Arab News, that the man, Faisal Al-Mutairi, was a former police officer who had resigned his job to go fight in Iraq.
