Another CCR client released from GITMO, and one more cleared for release

Another CCR client released from GITMO, and one more cleared for release

“I have become a body without a soul. I breathe, eat and drink, but I don’t belong to the world of living creatures. I rather belong to another world, a world that is buried in a grave called Guantánamo.”
That is how Zahir Hamdoun described his experience of indefinite detention at Guantánamo in a letter to CCR’s Pardiss Kebriaei, one of his attorneys, last summer. Last Monday, Zahir was finally released from that living tomb and resettled in the United Arab Emirates. After 14 long years in detention – during which he was never charged with a crime – he now has a chance to resume living.
Zahir hails from a tight-knit family in Yemen, a connection which sustained him in GITMO even though he rarely got to speak with them. In 1999 he traveled to Afghanistan to teach Islam. He fled to Pakistan at the onset of the U.S. war, where he was picked up and interrogated under duress, and then shipped to Guantánamo. The U.S. relied on statements he made during those interrogations, which he later recanted, to justify his detention. It. continued to hold him without charge as a “forever detainee” until this January, when CCR helped him win clearance for release under the administrative Periodic Review Board process.
Read Bertha Justice Institute Fellow Omar Shakir’s moving blog about Zahir’s release.
Meanwhile, a Periodic Review Board announced it had cleared CCR client Sufyian Barhoumi for release on August 11. Sufyian, who has been detained since 2002, is reportedly one of the best-liked men – among both fellow prisoners and guards – detained at Guantánamo. A package of supporting documents submitted to the PRB included a letter in support of his release from a former guard at the prison camp—the first submission of its kind in the 40 hearings held as of the date it was submitted.
Last week CCR Staff Attorney Omar Farah and Omar Shakir were in Guantánamo visiting other CCR clients. They were able to meet with Sufyian following this good news. They also met with Ghaleb Al-Bihani, who was cleared by the PRB over two years ago yet remains indefinitely detained.