The United States Department of Defense acknowledges holding one Swedish captive in Guantanamo. A total of 778 captives have been held in extrajudicial detention in the Guantanamo Bay detention camps, in Cuba since the camps opened on January 11, 2002 The camp population peaked in 2004 at approximately 660. Only nineteen new captives, all "high value detainees" have been transferred there since the United States Supreme Court's ruling in Rasul v. Bush. As of March 2013, 166 detainees remain at Guantanamo.
Mehdi Mohammad Ghezali, the sole Swedish captive in Guantanamo, was repatriated prior to the institution of the Combatant Status Review Tribunals. He was the subject of a feature length documentary that has received world-wide distribution.
Ghazali was apprehended by Pakistani authorities in August 2009 with a dozen other individuals. Pakistani security officials claim the travelers planned to travel to Miranshah to meet with a Taliban leader. Ghezali says they were traveling to Lahore to attend a Tablighi Jamaat conference.
A young Swedish couple, Munir Awad and Safia Benaouda, who were visiting Somalia when it was invaded by Kenyan and Ethiopian forces in 2007, reported being captured by Kenyan soldiers who were led by Americans. They reported being held in secret detention centres run with American oversight, and being interrogated by American interrogators. They were set free after several months of extrajudicial detention. They were later captured with Ghezali in Pakistan.
Famous quotes containing the word bay:
“Shall we now
Contaminate our fingers with base bribes,
And sell the mighty space of our large honors
For so much trash as may be grasped thus?
I had rather be a dog and bay the moon
Than such a Roman.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)