 Three Bahrainis who were held for four years at the Guantanamo Bay prison will file a lawsuit against the US Government over their mistreatment there. Adel Kamel, 41, Abdullah Majid Al Nuaimi, 24, and Shaikh Salman Bin Ebrahim Al Khalifa, 26, who returned to Bahrain on November 5, said that they were victims of torture. "We want compensation for the physical, mental and psychological abuse we had to endure because of the US administration. We have yet to decide on the amount of money, and we will monitor what the Britons released from the infamous jail will do and we will decide then," Al Nuaimi told Gulf News. "We suffered four of years of unjust incarceration without charges, and we want the Bahraini government to help us in our case against the US authorities," Kamel said at a press conference organised by MP Shaikh Mohammad Khalid.
The three said that they were arrested in Pakistan and they had been kept in legal limbo as suspected terrorists at the US detention centre where they were subjected to acts of torture. Al Nuaimi and Kamel said that they entered Pakistan through the Iranian borders.
"There were no administrative obstacles and the Afghani authorities at the border did not question our motives for the visit," they said. "In fact, we were kidnapped, not arrested. I met a Pakistani who worked in Bahrain and as I trusted him, he invited me to lunch. He later called the police who handed me to the US authorities. He obviously did it to get the reward promised by the US army," Kamel said.
| Good. I hope we paid him well. |
Al Nuaimi said that he was in Pakistan to help his relative Shaikh Salman who was on a humanitarian mission, but was stranded there because of the war.
| Just distributing guns and ammo to the widows and orphans. |
"We walked up to the Pakistani army and asked for their protection. We trusted them because we had all our papers with us and we were not doing anything illegal. "We thought they would hand us to our country, but instead, they transferred us to their intelligence authorities and eventually to the US army," said Al Nuaimi.
"The torturing started in Afghanistan where we were beaten up and made to lie down on a runway while US soldiers walked on our backs. They also kept us in cold weather without blankets and tortured us with electricity," Kamel said. "A US soldier once threw a copy of the Holy Quran into a barrel of excrement. Another soldier put his boot on the prayer leader as he was praying forcing him to keep his head on the floor. Other soldiers beat prisoners as they were praying. They smashed our heads against tent poles. It was an orchestrated act to humiliate us," he said.
| Just about word-for-word from Chapter 18. |
Most of the prisoners from 42 countries at the camp were in good spirits despite the moral and physical abuse, he said. "In fact, it was the US soldiers at the camp who were in bad shape. Two of them have tried to commit suicide because of the pressure. They were brainwashed into believing we were monsters, criminals, terrorists
Soldiers used to tell me that they were confused and that they did not know if they could believe we were monsters as their superiors wanted them to think," Al Nuaimi said. "We have nothing against the American people. It is their administration that is sowing seeds of hatred and spreading paranoia," he said. |