The US military will continue to hold an Iraqi news photographer arrested as a "terrorist" until it reviews an Iraqi order granting him amnesty, a spokesman for detainee affairs said on Friday. Lieutenant Commander Kenneth Marshall said the military was awaiting a report from the Iraqi authorities on the amnesty granted to Associated Press photographer Bilal Hussein.Hussein, 36, has been held since he was detained on April 12, 2006, in Ramadi, 100 kilometres (62 miles) west of Baghdad.
The US military accuses the photographer of being a "terrorist media operative" and says he had aroused suspicion because he was often at the scene of insurgent attacks as they occurred. He was detained after marines entered his house in Ramadi to establish a temporary observation post and allegedly found bomb-making materials, insurgent propaganda and a surveillance photograph of a US military installation.
An Iraqi judicial committee on Monday dismissed terrorism-related allegations against Hussein and ordered him released.
Marshall said, however, that the order related only to one charge and that a separate panel was investigating a second charge against the photographer, who was part of an AP photo team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2005.
"An amnesty panel has concluded that one of the charges is covered by amnesty; a separate panel considering the other charge has not yet announced its conclusion," Marshall said in an emailed response to queries from AFP. "Recall that by its own terms, the Amnesty Law does not purport to compel release of detainees in (US) detention facilities," he added.
US officials have said a UN Security Council mandate allows them to keep anyone in custody they believe is a security risk even if an Iraqi judicial body has ordered that prisoner freed.
AP says Hussein is alleged by the US military also to have had contacts with the kidnappers of an Italian citizen, Salvatore Santoro. In December 2004 Hussein photographed Santoro's body with two masked insurgents standing over it with guns. Hussein maintains he was one of three journalists who were stopped at gunpoint by insurgents and taken to see the propped-up body.
After the amnesty committee decision, AP president Tom Curley called on the military to "do the right thing by ending its detention of a journalist who did nothing more than his job."
Paris-based media watchdog Reporters Without Borders said the amnesty "could put an end to the nightmare that Bilal Hussein has been living for the past two years." "We urge the US authorities to release him without delay and not to persist in bringing new charges in order to prolong his detention," it said on Thursday.
New York-based Human Rights Watch too appealed for Hussein's release. "The US military held Bilal Hussein for nearly two years without charging, then transferred him to the Iraqi justice system, which apparently sees no reason to detain him," Joe Stork, the group's Middle East director, said in a statement. "It's time to set him free."
It's time for Joe Stork to start suffering yearly tax audits.