CAIRO, 22 October 2005 — Egyptian Sami Al-Laithi says he is physically crippled and mentally destroyed after more than three years of detention without charge in Guantanamo Bay. US authorities released Laithi from the prison for foreign terrorism suspects and handed him over to Egypt this month after a tribunal had cleared him of being an “enemy combatant”.
“Why was I imprisoned? Why was I hit? Does anybody have anything against me? No,” said Laithi, bound to a wheelchair by spinal injuries he says were inflicted by Guantanamo guards. “I didn’t go to any training camp. I did not join any Islamic group. I was working in education,” Laithi, 49, told Reuters in an interview late on Thursday.
Laithi said he was teaching Arabic and English at Kabul University when US-led forces invaded Afghanistan in 2001. Following aerial bombing of Kabul, he went to Pakistan, where he was detained and handed over to US forces. He said he could not remember exactly when he was detained. He was held in a detention camp in Kandahar, Afghanistan, before being taken to Guantanamo Bay. Laithi said he spent 10 or 11 months in a solitary confinement cell with only one small, opaque window. Interrogation at the prison, where some 500 suspects have been held, was in a cold room where he said he was made to sit alone for hours and in pain because of two fractured vertebrae.
“The Americans wanted me to confess that I had belonged to an Islamic group. I did not belong to a group. The interrogator would say to me: ‘This doesn’t make sense. All the Arabs there are in Islamic groups’,” he said. “They would leave me sitting for long periods without any reason or need until, from the extent of the pain and from the severity of the cold, I would collapse on the ground. “After that the guards would come and pull me, twist my torso and cause me great pain.”
The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) said in July the United States must close Guantanamo Bay. It said treatment of prisoners and reports of abuse of the Koran were encouraging hatred of the West. The US military has described cases of “mishandling” of the Qur’an by US personnel at Guantanamo, including splashing it with urine and kicking it. Laithi said US guards had left prisoners’ copies of the Qur’an on the floor. “We would put the Qur’an in a certain place, high up. Then we’d come and find it thrown on the bed or on the floor of the cell,” he said.
