An Ethiopian prisoner is scheduled to appear before a US military tribunal at the Guantanamo naval base this week on charges that include conspiring with US citizen Jose Padilla to build a radioactive "dirty bomb."US officials said when Padilla was arrested in May 2002 that he plotted with al-Qaeda to set off a radioactive explosives in the United States. Padilla was never charged in connection with such a plot, but is mentioned as a co-conspirator in the charges against Guantanamo prisoner Binyam Muhammad, one of four detainees set to appear before a military tribunal this week for pretrial hearings on charges of conspiring to commit war crimes.
The charges say Muhammad, an electrical engineer, joined al-Qaeda in 2001 and got weapons and explosives training at the group's camps and guest houses in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
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Muhammad later told officials at Guantanamo that the accusations were based on false confessions he gave to interrogators who tortured him in a Moroccan prison where he was sent after he was arrested trying to leave Pakistan in April 2002. At the prison, Muhammad was beaten and slashed on the chest and penis with scalpels, he said in court documents. "They had him confess to being part of the Padilla dirty bomb plot," said Muhammad's civilian attorney, Clive Stafford Smith.
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Stafford Smith said Muhammad "may have bumped into Padilla," but does not know him.
Muhammad is one of 10 Guantanamo detainees facing life in prison if convicted on the charges. The court is expected to rule in June or July. Military officials running the tribunals, formally called commissions, have been conducting pretrial hearings in hopes they can start the actual trials as soon as the Supreme Court rules.