Joe Biden under pressure to release ‘forever prisoner’ from Guantánamo Bay
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UN experts call on US president in his final week in office to free Abu Zubaydah, who was detained 23 years ago in the aftermath of 9/11. Joe Biden is under growing pressure to use his last week in office to free Abu Zubaydah, a Palestinian detained 23 years ago in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks and held without charge in Guantánamo Bay.
A panel of UN experts and a group of 100 legal and human rights scholars have written to the president appealing to him to pardon the 53-year-old prisoner, the first 9/11 detainee to be tortured at the CIA global network of secret prisons. “His immediate release and relocation to a third safe country are long overdue,” a group of 12 UN special rapporteurs on arbitrary detention, forced disappearances and other human issues, wrote in their letter to the outgoing president.
“Mr Abu Zubaydah suffers serious health conditions, including from injuries sustained during torture that are allegedly exacerbated by the denial of medical attention. In addition, lawyer-client communication has been seriously impeded,” they said.
Zubaydah, a Palestinian born in Saudi Arabia as Zayn Al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn, has been called America’s “forever prisoner”. He was detained by US and Pakistani intelligence agencies in Faisalabad, Pakistan, in March 2002, and spent more than four years in CIA black sites, reportedly including Pakistan, Afghanistan, Thailand, Diego Garcia and Poland, and was waterboarded 83 times in a single month, before his transfer to Guantanamo Bay in 2006.
