U.A.E. handed over another Yemeni to U.S. [Archives:2007/1102/Front Page]
Amel Al-Ariqi
SANA'A, Nov. 11 – Yemeni Foreign Minister Abu Baker Al-Karbi said that he had no information regarding the extradition of a Yemeni citizen from the Emirates to the United States in 2003.
Al-Karbi stated in a phone call with the Yemen Times that he can't comment about news that he never heard. However, he did not deny the extradition, saying that many countries handed over Yemenis to the U. S after Sept. 11. “Such extradition is against international law,” he added.
American lawyer Guy Eddon revealed that the United Arab Emirates handed a Yemeni citizen, Sanad Al-Kazimi, to U.S. authorities in 2003 to send him to Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.
Eddon, who defends Yemenis in Guantanamo with other U.S. lawyers, said that Al-Kazimi was first detained in the U.A.E. in 2003, where he was imprisoned for nine months without trial, tortured, and then handed over to the U.S. “The secret imprisonment and surrender of Yemen's son by Yemen's neighbor, the U.A.E., to the United States is deeply troubling. The U.A.E. was fully aware of Sanad's Yemeni nationality, but rather than extraditing him to Yemen, the U.A.E. facilitated a secret transfer to U.S. custody,” said Eddon.
He also confirmed that U.S. authorities sent Al-Kazimi first to a prison called “darkness prison” outside Kabul in Afghanistan, where CIA agents interrogated and tortured him. Eventually, he was transferred to Guantanamo, where he is still imprisoned without having been charged with a crime.
According to an analysis, one of the ways the American intelligence community obtains more information from captives is by transferring them to a third country in what is known as “a special transfer”.
“Al-Kazimi was deprived of his freedom far from the main theater of the 'war on terror' and far away chronologically from the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan,” commented Eddon, adding that Yemen must call for an investigation of the “unlawful treatment of its citizens and demand an end to their unlawful imprisonment at Guantanamo.”
Eddon confirmed that Al-Kazimi, whose wife and four children are in Aden, fears communicating with his family by mail, as personal information to and from his family is routinely used by interrogators to manipulate his emotions.
Al-Kazimi wasn't the first Yemeni handed over by the U.A.E. to American custody.
Abdulrahim Al-Nashiri was captured in 2002 in the U.A.E. after being condemned to death in abstention by Yemen in 2004 on allegations of his participation in planning attacks on the USS Cole, as well as planning the attack on the U.S. embassy in Nairobi in 1998. He was then handed over to the CIA.
The U.S rejected the official Yemeni demand to hand over Al-Nashri to Yemeni authorities to apply his sentence.
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