Bangkok Post – US repatriates Malaysians linked to 2002 Bali bombing

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Duo held at Guantanamo had pleaded guilty to helping accused mastermind Hambali

Detainees guarded by US military police sit in a holding area at the temporary Camp X-Ray, which was later closed and replaced by Camp Delta, inside the Guantanamo Bay naval base in January 2002. US authorities said this week that 27 people — among them some of the world’s most wanted terror suspects — are still being held at Guantanamo. (Photo: US Department of Defense/Petty Officer 1st Class Shane T McCoy via Reuters) The US military said on Wednesday that it had repatriated two Malaysian men from its prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, who admitted to committing war crimes for an affiliate of al-Qaida that carried out a deadly bombing in Bali in 2002.

The rare transfer, a day after the Pentagon released another prisoner to the custody of Kenya, reduced the detainee population to 27 men.

The freed prisoners, Mohammed Nazir Bin Lep, 47, and Mohammed Farik Bin Amin, 49, have been held by the United States since 2003. They were returned to the custody of the Malaysian government, and supervision of its deradicalisation programme, through a diplomatic arrangement that was reached as part of their guilty pleas in January.

Before they left, the men gave sworn testimony that prosecutors hope will be useful in the eventual trial of Encep Nurjaman, the Indonesian prisoner known as Hambali.

Hambali is accused of being the mastermind of the Bali bombing and other terrorist attacks in 2002 and 2003 as a leader of the Jemaah Islamiyah movement. The men admitted to being accessories to the terror attack, after the fact, by helping Hambali elude capture.

All three men were held for years after their capture in Thailand in the CIA’s secret prison network that used torture in its interrogations. They were transferred to the military prison in Cuba in 2006, but the military did not formally charge them at the war court until 2021.

Brian Bouffard, a lawyer who represented Bin Lep at Guantánamo, said his client “plans to live a quiet life with his family. He’s been punished many times over for his long-ago involvement with the wrong people, and we hope one day that his torturers and their enablers might face accountability for the evil they have done in our name”.

At their sentencing hearing in January, Bin Lep’s co-defendant, Bin Amin, showed sketches to the military jury that he had made portraying his first months in CIA custody — both the circumstances of his interrogation and his conditions at a “black site” prison in Afghanistan.

As part of their plea, the men admitted to training at al-Qaida camps in Afghanistan in 2000 and agreeing to become suicide bombers. Instead, upon their return to Southeast Asia, they ran errands for Hambali and acted as couriers for funds that were traced to suspected accomplices in the bombings in the resort of Bali on Oct 12, 2002, that killed 202 people, most of them Australian.

Under the plea agreement, the jury was instructed to sentence the men to 20 to 25 years for their crimes. The jurors returned a 23-year sentence. But the panel was unaware that, separately, through administrative credit from the military judge and a side deal with a Pentagon official overseeing the court, the men would be returned home sooner in exchange for their cooperation with the government.

Christine Funk, a lawyer for Bin Amin, said he “looks forward to the opportunity to continue living a life of purpose, taking care of his parents and pursuing a career that best reflects his skills and talents”.

Some relatives of those killed in the Bali bombings expressed disappointment that the men would get such short sentences but said they were hopeful that their testimony would help convict Hambali, who has been identified as a former leader of the movement that carried out the bombings.

Besides Hambali, five other prisoners are in pretrial proceedings at Guantánamo Bay for the attacks of Sept 11, 2001, and the bombing of the USS Cole on Oct 12, 2000. Also, an Iraqi prisoner who pleaded guilty is serving a sentence that ends in 2032.

Another five prisoners are effectively held as “indefinite detainees” in the war on terrorism, three of whom have never been charged but have been found to be too dangerous to release through an intelligence review process.

The other two are Ramzi Binalshibh, who was last year found to be mentally unfit to face trial in the Sept. 11 conspiracy case, and Ali Hamza al-Bahlul, who is serving a life sentence for conspiring to commit war crimes as a media adviser to Osama bin Laden.

That leaves 15 men, most of them Yemeni citizens, who were brought there by the George W Bush administration and were subsequently found to be eligible for transfer to countries that will help absorb them into society while monitoring them for signs of radicalisation.

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Bangkok Post – US repatriates Malaysians linked to 2002 Bali bombing

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