Mehdi Ghezali - Capture and Detention

Capture and Detention

After the Armed Forces of the United States together with the Afghan Northern Alliance initiated a bombing campaign on the Tora Bora mountains a large number of al-Qaeda sympathisers and others in the affected areas fled southward to Pakistan. Mehdi Ghezali was captured by local warlords in Pakistan in the Tora Bora mountains which are close to the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, and then handed over to the U.S. Armed Forces which transported him to Guantanamo Bay Naval Base on Cuba where Ghezali was held at Guantanamo Bay detainment camp.

In December 2002 Pakistan withdraws all charges against Ghezali in connection with his arrest at the Afghan border. Pakistan suspected him of having participated in a prison uprising in Pakistan, where 17 people (including seven prison guards) were killed. When questioned about the prison uprising at the press conference following his release Ghezali denied having any knowledge of or participation in the prison uprising.

During his stay at Guantanamo Bay, Ghezali was visited by representatives of the Swedish government (February 2002, January and July 2003 and January 2004) and was informed that he had been assigned an attorney in Sweden (Peter Althin) and that his case had been brought up in inter-governmental contacts and had been featured on several occasions in the Swedish media. Ghezali supposedly refused to discuss what he was doing in Afghanistan and Pakistan with the agents of the Swedish government.

On 15 May 2006 the United States Department of Defense released a list of all the individuals who had been held in military custody in their Guantanamo Bay detainment camps. That list gave Ghezali's Guantanamo detainee ID as 166. The DoD listed his place of birth as Stockholm.