MAURITANIAMAURITANIAUSACUBACUBA100 miles 500 milesadviser to Bin Laden and adopted the nom
de guerre Abu Hafs.
Slahi went back to Germany to finish his
degree and, he says, had little contact with
his cousin until 1998, when he got a call
from Hafs asking for assistance getting
money to Mauritania to treat his sick father.
Hafs wired $4,000 to Slahi’s German
account, which Slahi withdrew and gave to
friends travelling to Nouakchott. Only later,
Slahi says, did he discover that his cousin
had called using Bin Laden’s satellite phone.
The connections to extremists continued.
In late 1999 Slahi moved to Montreal,
where he prayed at a mosque also attended
by Ahmed Ressam, a radical who was
arrested in December that year at the US
border carrying large quantities of
explosives in his car boot. Ressam later
confessed he had planned to blow up Los
Angeles airport on New Year’s Eve in what
became known as the Millennium Plot.
Slahi stayed only a few months in Canada
before returning to Mauritania when his
mother fell sick, and he was there when
the 9/11 terror attacks took place.
A few weeks later, attending his niece’s
wedding, he received a summons from the
country’s spy chief. Initially he was not too
concerned as the state security had already
taken him in for questioning twice since his
return and then released him. But this time
he was put on a flight to Jordan, where he
was kept in a secret prison for six months
before being flown to Bagram, the biggest
US base in Afghanistan. There for the first
time he found himself in the custody of
American soldiers.
“Where is Mullah Omar [then leader of
the Taliban]?” they demanded. “Where is
Osama bin Laden?”
Slahi tried to explain he had never met
either man. But his links to known jihadists
counted against him. He was loaded onto
a plane with 33 other detainees, all tied to
each other, and on August 5, 2002, landed
in Cuba. He was left kneeling for hours
in the sun before being processed as
Prisoner 760. “I was shackled by my feet,
my hands, blindfolded, my ears muffled,
hoods, everything. I was like a walking bag.”
He spent the next 30 days in a freezing
isolation cell being questioned by the
FBI and Canadian and German officers
determined to find a connection between
him and 9/11. They showed him photos
of the 9/11 orchestrator Bin al-Shibh, who
had been captured in Pakistan, and they
claimed Slahi had recruited him.
“I figured I’ve seen the guy, but where
and when?” Slahi wrote in his diary.
Eventually he realised that Bin al-Shibh
was one of three men who had stayed at
his apartment in Germany for a night in
October 1999; the other two had been
among those who hijacked the 9/11 planes.
When I point out there seem to be an awful
lot of coincidences linking him to terrorists
— one of the US investigators calls him
“the Forrest Gump of al-Qaeda” — he nods.
“Absolutely,” he replies. “All this suspicion
is very logical, but that did not mean I was
guilty and that’s why the rule of law is very
important. You can suspect me of what you
want, but it’s not against the law to have
friends who are bad people or perceived as
bad by government. That’s the difference
between democracy and authoritarian
regimes. In authoritarian regimes suspicion
is enough to kill you, but not in a democracy.”
It took him about a year of Guantanamo,
he says, to stop believing US authorities
would release him. “That was when theystarted to introduce real physical torture
and sleep deprivation and sexual assault.”
The US military authorities running the
prison considered Slahi their highest-value
detainee. In May 2003 Slahi’s lead FBI
interrogator told him that the military
would take over his interrogation. “I wish
you good luck,” he added.
For the next 70 days Slahi had little
sleep. Interrogations could last 24 hours.
In between them his cell was kept so dark
he did not know the time of day and the
temperature so cold he was shaking. He was
alternately starved and force-fed, he says.
Having told medical officers he suffered
from sciatic nerve pain, interrogators kept
him in stress positions that exacerbated this.
One of the worst parts, he says, was
the sexual abuse from female guards.
“I didn’t understand how painful and how
humiliating it is to be sexually assaulted
by another person you are not willing to
engage with. It really scarred me.”
I tell him that I have interviewed many
female survivors who tell me it is
impossible to get over sexual abuse. “To this
day I have a lot of intimacy issues,” he
replies. I ask if he has had counselling.
“These things are a big taboo in this part of
the world,” he says. “It’s, like, ‘Man up, grow
a pair of balls.’ I talk to people I trust and can
open up to, and to other victims — a
woman who is a very close friend of mine
— but it’s hard. Neither of us wants to tell
the details or hear the details.”
Yet that was not the worst episode.
“The lowest moment was when they said
they had decided to kidnap my mother
and rape her.” They showed him a forged
ROUGH JUSTICE Tahar Rahim plays Slahi and Jodie Foster is his lawyer in The Mauritanian letter claiming she was in US custody.
GUANTANAMO BAY
Located at the oldest remaining
overseas US naval base, the
prison was set up in 2002 as
part of the Bush administration’s
“war on terror”. As of February
2021, 40 prisoners remainMAURITANIA, WEST AFRICA
About 90 per cent of Mauritania lies within the
Sahara and more than 16 per cent of the population
live in extreme poverty. Slavery was formally
abolished by law only in 1981, making it the last
country in the world to outlaw the practice, yet it
persists. Since independence in 1960 Mauritania
has been a strict Islamic republic, with almost all the
population identifying as Muslim, overwhelmingly
Sunni. It is one of only 13 countries where atheism
carries the death penalty. Though a key ally to the
US in its war on terror, Mauritania was a dictatorship
until elections in 2019 saw the first democratic
transition since its independence from FranceThe Sunday Times Magazine • 21