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Wednesday, March 08, 2006

Guantánamo and back: an interview with Moazzam Begg

British Muslim Moazzam Begg was arrested by the United States and detained without trial for three years, much of it at Guantánamo Bay. A year on he is ready to tell his story and Jane Kinninmont listens.

Former Guantánamo Bay detainee Moazzam Begg is devastatingly reasonable. He is calm, well-spoken, highly articulate, and small; when imprisoned by the US army in Afghanistan, he says, his hands were small enough to slip out of their cuffs when the guards were absent.

Begg was imprisoned for three years without charge or trial. A British citizen, he was picked up by US intelligence officials in Pakistan in January 2002; they accused him of being a member of al-Qaida, which he denies.

At first, Begg was taken to the Bagram detention centre in Afghanistan, where, he says, he went a year without seeing sunlight. From January 2003, he was moved to Guantánamo Bay. Most of his time there was spent in solitary confinement.

....Read rest of Jane Kinninmont's Open Democracy article here

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