U.S. authorities have transferred to Belize a Pakistani linked to the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, Khalid Shaykh Mohamed, and imprisoned at the Guantanamo Bay base in Cuba, in the first such gesture since Joe Biden came to the White House two years ago.
The latest beneficiary of this program of transfers to other countries is Mayid Jan, according to senior officials quoted by NBC News, who also reported that two other prisoners will be sent abroad in the coming weeks.
Jan is considered the only Guantanamo prisoner with legal residence in the United States, since the authorities granted him asylum in 1998. However, he returned to his native Pakistan in 2003, at which point he came under the command of Khalid Shaykh Mohamed and assisted in subsequent attacks such as a hotel bombing in the Indonesian capital.
He was arrested in 2003 and transferred to a secret CIA facility where he was subjected to interrogation tactics such as sleep deprivation and ice water baths, according to a U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee report.
Nine years later, he pleaded guilty to terrorism charges and was sentenced to ten years in prison. Jan served that sentence in March 2022, but U.S. law specifically states that Guantanamo prisoners cannot be released in the United States.
Until now, no inmate from this base had ever been transferred to a country in the Western Hemisphere. The Guantánamo base, which once housed more than 600 prisoners, continues to hold some 34 terrorism suspects today, with no clear strategy agreed upon for all of them.
Source: (EUROPA PRESS)
