Algerian Six

The Algerian Six are six Muslim men who had been imprisoned without charges at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba since January 2002; five of them were ordered released after a long disputed habeas hearing before Judge Leon in the Federal District Court in Washington, D.C.; three were then flown to Bosnia to reunite in 'protective custody' with their families while three remained at Guantanamo, one, Belkacem, as a suspected terrorist and the other two, including Lakhmar Boumediene, as effectively stateless because Bosnia did not want them. The men were all born in Algeria, but five of the six were naturalized Bosnian citizens and the sixth had been a permanent resident of Bosnia prior to his detention. Five of the men worked for humanitarian organizations in Bosnia before they were sent to Guantanamo. After falling under U.S. suspicion of planning an attack on the U.S. embassy in Bosnia, the six men were turned over to the U.S. in January 2002 in Sarajevo by the government of Bosnia and Herzegovina at the express demand of the U.S. Though they have remained imprisoned at Guantanamo since that date, the U.S. has yet to charge any of the men with any crimes.

The six men were formally arrested by Bosnian authorities in October 2001. They were held in Bosnian custody during a three-month investigation into U.S. claims that the men had plotted an attack on the U.S. and British Embassies. This investigation produced no evidence to justify their continued detention. The six men were then ordered released by the Bosnian Supreme Court, with recommendation of the prosecutor. At the moment of their release from Bosnian imprisonment, they were illegally handed over to American officials who flew them to detention and interrogation in the U.S. naval base at Guanatanamo Bay, Cuba. The conduct of the Bosnian authorities was formally condemned as illegal by the Human Rights Chamber of Bosnia Herzegovina, the relevant Bosnian court at the time. Amnesty International recalled in 2002 that the Bosnian Supreme Court explicitly opposed itself to this transfer to US authorities

In late 2004, the six men were sent before Combatant Status Review Tribunals (CSRTs) of three military officers. The CSRTs concluded that the six men were properly classified as "enemy combatants" based on classified evidence, which justified their continued detention at Guantanamo. However, transcripts of CSRT hearings for four of the six men record the Bosnians reporting to their tribunal officers that interrogators did not believe that there had ever been any substance to the U.S. allegations that they had planned to bomb the U.S. embassy. Furthermore, the CSRTs applied a definition of "enemy combatant" that was so broad the government admitted it could include a "little old lady in Switzerland," who donated money to a chartiy in Afghanistan that then, without her knowledge, funded al Qaeda. (See Transcript of Motion to Dismiss before United States District Court Judge Joyce Hens Green at pp. 25–26 (December 1, 2004) Rasul v. Bush, Docket No. 02-02999; see also press coverage, for example, Neil A. Lewis, Fate of Guantanamo Detainees Is debated in Federal Court, NY Times (Dec. 2, 2004), available for download at ).

According to Wolfgang Petritsch, UN diplomat and former High Representative for Bosnia-Herzegovina, the US threatened the UN to withdraw their men from the mission if he protested against the transfer of the Six. The transfer was done by US general John Sylvester, then commandant of the SFOR United Nations forces.

Three British citizens who had been detained in Guantanamo, the "Tipton Three", wrote a 131 page account of their time Guantanamo. They wrote about the Bosnians:

"By Bosnians we mean six Algerians who were unlawfully taken from Bosnia to Guantanamo Bay. They told us how they had won their Court case in Bosnia. As they walked out of Court, Americans were there and grabbed them and took them to Camp X-Ray, January 20, 2002. They arrived five days after us. They were treated particularly badly. They were moved every two hours. They were kept naked in their cells. They were taken to interrogation for hours on end. They were short shackled for sometimes days on end. They were deprived of their sleep. They never got letters, nor books, nor reading materials. The Bosnians had the same interrogators for a while as we did and so we knew the names which were the same as ours and they were given a very hard time by those. They told us that the interrogators said if they didn't cooperate that they could ensure that something would happen to their families in Algeria and in Bosnia. They had dual nationality. They had families in Bosnia as well as in Algeria."