MANAMA, 9 August 2004 — A Bahraini rights group said on Saturday it had received reports a member of the country’s royal family had been tortured at Guantanamo Bay. It is the second report of abuse of a Bahraini national at the US naval base in Cuba where hundreds of people seized during the 2002 US-led war in Afghanistan are held.
The Bahrain Center for Human Rights (BCHR) said an Arab recently freed from the base had said Sheikh Salman ibn Ebrahim Al-Khalifa, a distant relative of Bahrain’s King Hamad, had been tortured but did not elaborate.
The charge comes a day after Bahrain said it would ask the United States to investigate allegations US troops in Guantanamo tortured another Bahraini detainee Juma Al-Dossary.
A report by BCHR quotes three Britons freed from the base as saying Al-Dossary was repeatedly beaten by US soldiers.
“One of the Arabs who was recently freed from Guantanamo told our centre that Sheikh Salman was also tortured,” BCHR’s president, Nabeel Rajab, told Reuters. “He said Sheikh Salman was mistreated because he was not cooperative ...,” Rajab said, declining to give the name or nationality of his source.
Bahraini Foreign Ministry official Youssef Mahmoud told Reuters the query to Washington would also include Sheikh Salman and four more Bahrainis who have been held at Guantanamo for more than two years. Sheikh Salman’s family said he was arrested in Pakistan where he had gone to do relief work.
A group of international lawyers visited Bahrain, the headquarters for the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet, last month during a trip to other Arab countries to prepare a lawsuit on behalf of the Guantanamo prisoners.
