Reuters – July 24, 2006
A Spanish man held in Guantanamo Bay and then jailed for six years in Spain for membership of al Qaeda was cleared by Spain's Supreme Court on Monday on grounds there was a lack of evidence against him.
The court ordered the immediate release of Hamed Abderrahaman Ahmad, known in Spain as "the Spanish Taliban," after he spent two years at the Guantanamo U.S. naval base before being handed over to Spain in 2005 and convicted.
Spain's High Court ruled last October that Ahmad, a 31-year-old from the Spanish enclave of Ceuta in North Africa, had been recruited by al Qaeda and sent to Afghanistan to receive training.
The Supreme Court said the High Court had not considered Ahmad "innocent until proven guilty" and used evidence collected at Guantanamo that "should be declared totally void and, as such, non-existent."
"It is entirely remiss in its role of providing evidence," the Supreme Court said of the High Court.
The Supreme Court said the detention of hundreds of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay without charges and in judicial "limbo" was impossible to justify on either legal or political grounds.
In February 2004, Ahmad became the first prisoner at Guantanamo to be handed over to a foreign country for prosecution when the United States agreed to a Spanish extradition request.
In the High Court case, prosecutors said Ahmad had traveled to Afghanistan in August 2001 to fight for the Taliban government and received religious and military training.
With the threat of a U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, after the September 11 attacks, Ahmad left the country and was arrested by Pakistani soldiers who handed him over to U.S. authorities, prosecutors said.
"Neither the motivation the subject had to travel to Afghanistan, nor the activities he carried out, justifies the verdict passed by the High Court," the Supreme Court ruling said.
www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/24/AR2006072400382.html
Last updated 27/07/2006
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