DUSHANBE, July 9, 2009, Asia-Plus — A Guantánamo Bay captive is so fearful of returning to Tajikistan that he is fighting U.S. plans to send him there.
Radio Liberty’s Tajik Service reports that Umar Abdulloyev, who is the last Tajik at Guantánamo, does not want to go home.
The 30-year-old Tajik national Umar Abdulloyev, who was held in Guantanamo for seven years, is asking to stay at the U.S. Navy base in Cuba.
According to RFE/RL’s Tajik Service, Chicago attorney Matthew J. O”Hara, representing Umar Abdulloyev, said that Abdulloyev told them he had rather stay another seven years in Guantanamo than go back to Tajikistan.
O”Hara has argued, like other detainees” lawyers, that his client is wrongly imprisoned, an innocent swept up in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The lawyer is trying to resist an Obama administration plan to send him to his homeland.
Abdulloyev reportedly fled civil war in Tajikistan at age 13.
The U.S. administration earlier repatriated 11 other Tajiks, and one of them is now serving 23-year prison sentence.
We will recall that the Khatlon regional court sentenced Ibrohim Nasriddinov, a former inmate at the U.S. detention facility in Guantanamo, Cuba, to a 23-year prison term in March 2007. The sentence followed his conviction on murder and weapons charges. The court found that the 31-year-old Nasriddinov was a member of Al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Odil Yorbekov, Nasriddinov”s lawyer, said that his client pleaded guilty to all charges. Yorbekov said, “My client committed a contract murder using a handmade explosive device in Danghara in 2000, and in order to escape punishment fled to Afghanistan and joined terrorists. He underwent military training in Afghanistan and Pakistan for several years. In 2006, he was detained in Kunduz by U.S. Special Forces and sent to Guantanamo.”
