An Afghan writer, who claims to have spent about six months at a secret cell in Peshawar after authoring a book on “The Broken Shackles of Guantanamo”, has accused the intelligence agencies of detaining 35-40 people at a secret prison located somewhere between Gora Qabristan and Peshawar airport. “Most of the inmates were suffering from tuberculosis without any healthcare facilities available to them,” said Abdur Raheem Muslim Dost, who is presently imprisoned at the Peshawar Central Prison on charges of violating visa rules and illegal stay in Pakistan.In an interview with Daily Times at the jail’s meeting room, he said, “Detention cells at the Guantanamo Bay are far better than those I witnessed in Peshawar, being run by the intelligence agencies,” Dost recalled.
Comparing detention cells of the infamous Guantanamo Bay and Pakistan, he said the authorities at Camp X-Ray did not stop him from writing what he wanted. “But, regrettably, we were deprived of the same facility in Pakistan,” said the Afghan writer, who earlier spent three and a half years in US custody at Bagram Airbase, Kandahar Airport and Camp X-Ray in Cuba.
Dost said Gitmo detainees had written 22 poems, which were published in the form of a book titled “The Detainees Speak”.
Dost said Pakistani intelligence agencies’ personnel detained him through Khyber Agency political authorities, which charged him under Section 40 of the Frontier Crimes Regulation (FCR) and Section 14 of the Foreigners Act. “If authorities consider publication of my book written on wrongdoings and injustices by the agencies with innocent detainees, then I will made this mistake time and again,” he said. Dost said that Saleh Muhammad from Sadda in Kurram Agency was brutally tortured. He said Mufti Muneer Shakir and Qari Subhanullah, released recently, were also at the same dungeon.
Dost, a Mohmand tribesman from the Sahibano village of Ningarhar in Afghanistan, said they were kept in tiny rooms and were allowed to go out twice a day.
Asked about the reasons for his incarceration, he said it was because of co-authoring a Pashto language book, Da Guantanamo Matay Zolanay (The Broken Shackles of Guantanamo) published in Peshawar in July 2006.
“On September 29, 2006, agencies personnel and CID police arrested me while I was coming out of a mosque in Academy Town after Friday prayers,” he said, adding that the agencies personnel drove him handcuffed and blindfolded to their office near the Army Stadium. “I was already familiar with the detention centre, as I had spent some time there before I was shifted to Guantanamo Bay in 2001,” he added. He said an intelligence official, in his mid-30s, questioned him about the book. “I explicitly told him that I had co-authored the book and would write another one once I was released,” he said.
He said that on May 22, the agencies handed him over to the Nasirbagh Police where he remained for a night. The next day, he said, the secret agents shifted him back to their secret detention cell, wherefrom he was later handed over to Khasadar force in Landi Kotal, Khyber Agency.
Asked about the required documents for his stay in Pakistan, he said he had been living here for the last 35 years. “Afghan Commissionerate had issued me a registration card, which was seized by the agencies personnel during my detention and was not returned,” he added. Dost was arrested from Peshawar on November 17, 2001 soon after the fall of the Taliban government in neighbouring Afghanistan. He was release along with his brother on September 24, 2004, after which they published a 500-page book about their incarceration at the Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere as prisoners.