France convicts five Guantanamo inmates
Five former inmates of Guantanamo Bay were convicted on terrorism-related charges in France today.
A sixth man was acquitted, and his lawyer said he would try to win reparations from the US government for his time at the prison in Cuba. Meanwhile, three long-time British residents held at Guantanamo were released.
The ruling in Paris capped proceedings that seemed at times like a trial of the US prison camp itself, with the prosecutor lashing out at the “Guantanamo system” and saying the prison violates international law.
Seven French citizens were captured in or near Afghanistan by US forces in late 2001, held at Guantanamo and then handed over to French authorities in 2004 and 2005. One was freed immediately and found to have no ties to terrorism.
The others spent up to 17 months in prison in France. All were free by the time the verdict was announced today.
The five men were convicted of “criminal association with a terrorist enterprise”, a broad charge frequently used in France.
The court gave them one-year prison sentences, but they will remain free. Time that the men served in provisional sentences upon their return home to France counts toward their new sentences.
The court followed the recommendations of Prosecutor Sonya Djemni-Wagner, who said earlier this month that she could not condone what she called the men’s “abnormal detention” at Guantanamo.
“None of them should have been held on that base, in defiance of international law, and have had to go through what they went through,” she said.
She said they should, however, be convicted because they used fake identity papers and visas to knowingly “integrate into terrorist structures” in Afghanistan.
Five of the men – Brahim Yadel, Khaled ben Mustafa, Nizar Sassi, Mourad Benchellali and Ridouane Khalid – said during the trial that they had spent time in military training camps in Afghanistan but said they had never put their combat skills to use.
The sixth man, Imad Kanouni, said he went to Afghanistan for spiritual reasons. He was acquitted, as the prosecutor had recommended.
All the men insisted during the trial that they were innocent of the charges.
The verdict was originally expected in September 2006 but was postponed. At the time, the court said it needed to seek more information about secret interrogations of the suspects by French intelligence officers at the American base.
