Spanish Guantanamo prisoner ‘to sue Bush’

27 July 2004

MADRID – Spanish terror suspect Hamed Abderrahmane is to sue US President George W Bush and his administration after spending two years in US detention in Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay on Cuba, his lawyer said Tuesday.

“We have yet to decide in which legal jurisdiction we will attack. We have the choice between Spain, the United States, or an international jurisdiction,” the lawyer, Marcos Garcia Montes, said.

“We will base our case on the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” he said.

Abderrahmane, dubbed the “Spanish taliban” by the Spanish media and a Muslim from the Spanish north African enclave of Ceuta, is currently free under judicial supervision facing accusations of “belonging to a terrorist cell.”

Top Spanish judge Baltasar Garzon is investigating his case.

“I cannot prejudice the case but if the Americans have let Hamed go it is because he is innocent. I hope the case will be laid to rest soon and then we will attack, probably in September,” Garcia Montes said.

“Hamed Abderrahmane has been a victim of judicial torture. We hope to obtain a penal conviction as well as damages and interest.  Abderrahmane deserves that,” his lawyer added.

“Nobody can be imprisoned for so long without seeing a judge or having access to a lawyer.”

Abderrahmane was arrested in Pakistan in October 2001, just weeks after the September 11 attacks in the United States, having fled Afghanistan, where he was studying at a Koranic school.

In December of that year he was handed over to US military custody and after a spell under arrest in the Afghan city of Kandahar he was transferred to the US base at Guantanamo Bay on Cuba in February 2002.

Last February he was released and returned to Madrid, where in July he was freed pending further investigations.
  
[Copyright EFE with Expatica]

Subject: Spanish news