WASHINGTON: The US government on Monday agreed to release a Yemeni surgeon who prosecutors say treated Al-Qaeda wounded at Tora Bora in Afghanistan under a new review ordered by President Barack Obama meant to empty Guantanamo by January 2010.
Ayman Saeed Batarfi, 38, a Yemeni citizen and doctor whose family lives in Saudi Arabia, told a military review panel that he was a humanitarian worker who found himself at the battle of Tora Bora while Osama bin Laden was in the area, according to a Pentagon transcript. He is the second detainee whose release was ordered during the Obama administration.
At one point, Batarfi said, the Al-Qaeda leader appeared in a graveyard near Tora Bora in 2001 while the doctor was burying the dead from American air assaults on Afghanistan.
Bin Laden “was there and said a prayer” for the victim being buried, Batarfi said in the transcript of a hearing held here in 2005.
Batarfi also told the 2005 review panel that he did not respect bin Laden, whom he described as “a coward” who “left the people behind when he escaped to the mountains.”
In past hearings, lawyers had sparred over exactly what Batarfi was doing in Afghanistan when he was caught.
His lawyers and Amnesty International say he was an innocent Arab doing humanitarian work along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, when he was injured and swept up by Northern Alliance forces, which turned him over to the US.
However, Justice Department lawyers contend he was at one of Al-Qaeda’s major battles, and not just as a charity worker.
US District Judge Emmet Sullivan said in January that he was forced to delay ruling on whether to free Batarfi because as many as 10 documents of classified information were withheld from the court until recently.
At the time, the judge called the government’s conduct unfair and disingenuous.
The issue of classified evidence is not unique to Batarfi. Much of the evidence in the cases of hundreds of detainees seeking release will likely never be made public.
Obama ordered Attorney General Eric Holder to set up a series of review processes of the 240 or so war-on-terror captives here from some 30 countries, and set a Jan. 22, 2010, deadline for to empty the prison camps.
Monday’s announcement by Holder’s spokesman, along with a filing in US District Court in Washington, D.C., signaled that the administration was no longer willing to defend the Pentagon’s seven-year incarceration of Batarfi.
A volunteer Baltimore-based legal team had filed an unlawful detention suit known as a habeas corpus petition.
The government said in a filing Monday that Batarfi, who had petitioned for his freedom, and agents for Defense Secretary Robert Gates had mutually agreed he should no longer be held at Guantánamo.
The US Justice Department said the release of Batarfi, a doctor, won’t be easy because officials expect difficulty finding a country willing to take him.
Although the Bush administration declared him an enemy combatant, alleging ties to Al-Qaeda, Batarfi was never formally charged.
Batarfi can restart his lawsuit if he is not delivered to a country acceptable to him within 30 days, according to the terms of the deal that still must be reviewed by a judge.
The US will now work to transfer Batarfi “to an appropriate destination country in a manner that is consistent with the national security and foreign policy interests of the United States and the interests of justice,” said Justice Department spokesman Dean Boyd.
Meanwhile, a US army sergeant pleaded guilty in Germany to murder Monday in the deaths of four Iraqi prisoners in 2007, telling a military court that the slayings “were in the best interest of my soldiers.”
Sergeant First Class Joseph Mayo, 27, pleaded guilty to charges of “conspiracy to commit premeditated murder” at a court martial in Vilseck, Germany, and was also dishonorably discharged, the army said in a statement.
He was sentenced to life imprisonment for his part in the murder of four Iraqi detainees in Baghdad, the army said on Monday.
The court-martial took place in Germany, where his unit is based and where the United States has one of its largest military logistics and transport centers outside its territory.
In his plea, Mayo agreed to testify at the forthcoming trial of Master Sergeant John Hatley, another US soldier identified by witnesses as having taken part in the killing of the unarmed prisoners, found handcuffed, blindfolded and shot dead near a Baghdad canal in 2007.
Mayo because the fourth soldier convicted in the deaths of four Iraqi men in Baghdad in the Spring of 2007. The prisoners were each shot in the back of the head while handcuffed and blindfolded, then dumped into a canal, according to testimony.
