Majid Khan (detainee)

Majid Khan (detainee)

Majid Khan is the only legal resident of the United States who is held in the Guantanamo Bay detainment camps. He was detained after returning to his native Pakistan to visit his wife and was captured by Pakistani authorities who then handed him over the CIA.

Iyman Faris told authorities that Khan had referred to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed as an "uncle" and spoken of a desire to kill then president of Pakistan, Pervez Musharraf. After Khan was taken into custody, sent to a CIA black site and transferred to Guantanamo Bay, Faris said that his accusations had been "an absolute lie" and that he had been coerced into making the statements.

A former resident of Baltimore, Maryland, Khan has made repeated offers to submit to a polygraph test to prove his innocence, but been denied. The Director of National Intelligence has asserted that Khan's experience working in his father's gas station "...made Khan highly qualified to assist Mohammad with the research and planning to blow up gas stations."

He is represented by the Center for Constitutional Rights and is the only so-called "high value" detainee to have legal representation. While in Guantanamo he has twice attempted suicide, and has submitted a variety of complaints from having his beard forcibly shaved and spending weeks without sunlight, to less serious complaints alleging that detainees are expected to wash with "cheap branded, unscented soap", that he is now forced to read the "poor quality" Joint Task Force Guantanamo's weekly newsletter The Wire.

Khaled el-Masri, a citizen of Germany held for five months in a secret CIA interrogation site known as "the salt pit" in 2003, a victim of mistaken identity, has reported that Majid Khan was one of his fellow captives there.