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Saudi Facing US Tribunal, Defense Charges Torture
A Saudi charged with being part of an al Qaeda bomb-making cell was set to appear on Tuesday before a U.S. military tribunal in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, on evidence that his military defense attorney says was obtained through torture.

Jabran Said bin al Qahtani, an electrical engineer captured at an al Qaeda safe house in Pakistan in March 2002, was trained by the militant network to make small hand-held remote detonators of a kind later used in improvised devices against U.S. forces in Afghanistan, the U.S. military says.
Tech support guy, was he? Let the Pakistanis Taliban do the heavy work.
A military charge sheet says Qahtani wrote two instruction manuals on how to assemble circuit boards that could be used as timing devices for bombs and was preparing to join the fight against U.S. troops when Pakistani forces captured him and two alleged co-conspirators in the Pakistani city of Faisalabad.
Long way from home, wasn't he? Musta been a pilgrim.
The three men -- Qahtani, Algerian Sufyian Barhoumi and Saudi Ghassan Abdullah al Sharbi -- are scheduled to appear separately before the tribunal for pretrial hearings this week.

They are among only 10 out of 490 detainees in the Guantanamo Bay prison camp who have been charged with war crimes before the tribunals, known formally as commissions. All of those charged so far face life in prison if convicted. Air Force Col. Moe Davis, chief prosecutor for the tribunals, said the military was developing charges in two dozen more cases against Guantanamo prisoners, including some that could draw the death penalty.

Qahtani is to make his first appearance before the tribunal on Tuesday for what his military attorney, Army Lt. Col. Bryan Broyles, said would be an uneventful proceeding. But Broyles is preparing to challenge the case against his client under a Defense Department directive that formally instructs tribunals to prohibit the use of evidence found to result from torture. "I believe there's torture-related evidence in the prosecution's case against my client," he told reporters without elaborating.
"I mean, he said he was tortured."
"It'll be a pretrial motion," Broyles added. "I have to take a specific piece of evidence and say, 'This statement I challenge because I believe it's a result of torture."'
Posted by: Fred 2006-04-26
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=149796