A US judge has ordered the release of a high-profile detainee at the military prison on Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, saying the government was unable to prove at the time of his capture that he was a part of al-Qaeda, it was reported Saturday.
US District Court Judge James Robertson ruled the government cannot continue to hold Mohamedou Ould Slahi, a Mauritanian citizen, only because it fears he will renew his ties with al-Qaeda or commit illegal acts, the Washington Post reported.
Portions of Robertson's ruling of March 22 were made public on Friday, DPA reported.
Slahi is believed to have ties to some of the September 11, 2001, hijackers and other al-Qaeda members.
According to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Slahi was arrested in Mauritania, then taken to Jordan where he was interrogated and abused for eight months, next sent to Bagram in Afghanistan and finally transferred to Guantanamo, where he has been held since August 2002.
"Slahi's illegal detention for more than eight years without charge or trial embodies the most egregious abuses of Guantanamo," said Jonathan Hafetz, an attorney with ACLU's National Security Project.
In 2009, a report by the Senate Armed Services Committee detailed the torture Slahi was subjected to. It said Slahi was kept in isolation for months, held in a freezing cell, shackled to the floor, deprived of food, made to drink salt water, forced to stand in a room with strobe lights and heavy metal music for hours, forbidden from praying and beaten. He was also falsely told that his mother had been arrested and was being sent to Guantanamo.
Judge Robertson found that Slahi, who swore loyalty to al-Qaeda in the early 1990s, was providing no support to the terrorist group at the time of his capture in late 2001. The judge said Slahi's contacts with terrorism suspects in the decade before his capture "are too brief and shallow to serve as an independent basis for detention," the report said.
The 9/11 Commission Report had found that Slahi directed two of the hijackers and a main planner to go to Afghanistan in 1999, the Post reported. But Robertson said the evidence only indicated that Slahi hosted three men for one night at his home in Germany and that one of them was Ramzi Binalshibh, a key 9/11 planner.
"The government's problem is that its proof that (Slahi) gave material support to terrorists is so attenuated, or so tainted by coercion and mistreatment, or so classified, that it cannot support a successful criminal prosecution," Robertson wrote.
One of his attorneys, Theresa Duncan, said, "The truth is the government was wrong when it first detained him, wrong when it tortured him and is wrong in continuing to detain him."
The government plans to appeal Robertson's decision.
The number of detainees still at Guantanamo now stands at 183, according to the Justice Department.
US President Barack Obama missed a self-imposed January deadline to close Guantanamo, in part because countries have been unwilling to take larger numbers of the detainees, and also because of complications associated with how to try those who can be prosecuted.
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