At 12 noon Pakistan time on Friday, Ahmed Rabbani and his brother Abdul landed in Islamabad, released after 20 years of torture and detention without trial in the Dark Prison in Kabul and Guantánamo Bay.
Their torment began on September 10, 2002, when Ahmed was handed over to the U.S. by the Musharraf government for a bounty of $5000, after mistakenly identifying him as the notorious terrorist Hassan Ghul. From the beginning, Ahmed insisted he was a Karachi taxi driver, not Ghul, but he was taken with his brother to the Dark Prison for 540 days and nights of torture.
In an extraordinary twist, Ghul was captured by the U.S. and brought to the same prison, but released because he “cooperated”. He went back to his terrorist ways and was killed in 2012. The Rabbani brothers went to Guantánamo Bay, where they became an international embarrassment.
Ahmed complied with his abusers for several years before losing patience. In 2013, he went on a hunger strike which lasted a world-record 7 years, and he was force fed to keep him alive. He lost half his body weight, reduced at one point to 84 lbs (6 stone). His Anglo-American lawyer Clive Stafford Smith got art supplies to divert him, and he became one of the prison’s celebrated artists. Indeed on May 2, 2023, there will be a show of his work in Karachi. He is also a skilled chef, and cooked for other prisoners even while he starved himself. Some of his recipes cleared the U.S. military censors and Yorkshire chef Damon Wright is working with him to produce the “Guantánamo Cook Book”.
Most moving, he had never met his 20 year old son Jawad until he landed in Islamabad. Unknown to him, his wife had been pregnant at the time of his original abduction and he got to hug his boy for the first time.
“For once, miscarriage of justice is the wrong term,” said Clive Stafford Smith Director of the non-profit 3DCentre. “He never got any justice at all. No charges, no trial, it’s just not what we should be about. Now we need to help him and his brother rebuild their lives, along with their families.”
“I am so glad finally to have met my father for the first time,” said Jawad Rabbani, aged 20. “We have a lot to catch up on.”
Visit the #RabbaniRelease Crowdfunder page to pledge your support and help them reintegrate.
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