Abdurahman Khadr - Arrest and Release

Arrest and Release

In November 2001, Khadr was captured by the Northern Alliance in Kabul, a city he was wandering aimlessly without direction, although one elderly man later claimed that he had installed an anti-aircraft gun on the roof of a house. He was handed over to American authorities. He later claimed to have been captured several other times, and released each time.

At this point, stories begin to diverge. Khadr claims he lived for nine months in a CIA safe house near the American Embassy in Kabul, and worked abroad as an informant. But other sources say he was taken to Guantanamo Bay on March 21, 2002.

The CIA reportedly offered him a contract in March 2003 and asked him to work as an infiltrator for American intelligence in Guantanamo, being paid $5,000 and a monthly stipend of $3000. While in Cuba, Khadr worked to obtain information from his fellow inmates before spending five additional months at the Camp X-Ray prison, where he claims to have been given training as an undercover CIA operative.

The Department of Defense published height and weight records for all but ten of the captives held in Guantanamo. Khadr is one of the ten men whose height and weight records were withheld. Khadr was listed as "Abdul Khadr" on the Department of Defense's official list of Guantanamo detainees. The Department of Defense has not offered an explanation for why no records for those ten men were published.

Although the United States later said that Khadr had been removed from the camp in July 2003, an October 9 memo summarizing a meeting between General Geoffrey Miller and his staff and Vincent Cassard of the ICRC, acknowledged that camp authorities were not permitting the ICRC to have access to Khadr, and three other detainees, due to "military necessity".

He says he was later given a bogus passport and boarded a Gulfstream jet assigned to CIA Director George Tenet and, after a stop-over in Portugal, landed in Bosnia where he was asked to conduct a spy operation at mosques in Sarajevo. Khadr states that he attempted to approach Canadian embassies in various nations and was rebuffed at all of them. He phoned his grandmother Fatmah el-Samnah while in Sarajevo and asked her to go to the Canadian media and tell them that he had been stranded and refused entry back into Canada. He was finally granted admittance to the Canadian embassy in Bosnia and was flown back to Canada on November 30, 2003.

On December 4, 2003, Khadr held a press conference with lawyer Rocco Galati and gave spurious answers to questions about his role in the War on Terror, not mentioning any alleged cooperation with the CIA. The following month, he denied reports by the Toronto Star that he had been released in exchange for giving the Americans information on the location of his father, who was killed in a Predator drone airstrike in Waziristan two weeks before Abdurahman's release.