ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (AP) - Pakistani security officials were questioning a man freed from the U.S. prison in Guantanamo Bay and returned to his homeland more than six years after his detention, a senior official said Monday.
Qari Saad Madni returned to Pakistan on Saturday and was being debriefed, Interior Secretary Kamal Shah told The Associated Press. He said there were no plans to charge Madni with any crime and that he would be released within days.
According to a record of testimony released by the Pentagon in 2006, Madni told a tribunal reviewing his status as an enemy combatant that he was arrested in January 2002 in Indonesia.
He denied being a member of al-Qaida, but acknowledged that he had been in contact with al-Qaida-linked terrorists in Indonesia and hearing about a suicide bomb plot against a U.S. official in Indonesia.
Shah declined to comment further on Madni's case, saying he was waiting for the results of the debriefing.
According to the testimony, Madni said he was moved from Indonesia to Egypt, and then via Pakistan to Afghanistan, where he spent nearly a year in custody.
Madni, now 30, said he initially went to Indonesia to visit his Indonesian stepmother and a brother and had tried to commit suicide during his first year in detention.
Many Pakistanis suspected of links to al-Qaida and the Taliban were swept up after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, most of them in Afghanistan and in Pakistan, and wound up in U.S. custody.
Shah said five other Pakistanis remain at Guantanamo Bay and the Pakistani government was seeking their release. |