Dressed in a regulation orange boiler suit, his hands manacled, his feet in leg irons, Feroz Abbasi was led into a small room at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba by two guards and told to take a seat. He was then chained to a metal ring on the floor.
Abbasi gazed nervously around the room where three senior US officers were sitting calmly before him.
The men two air force colonels and a navy commander were part of a specially convened tribunal to decide Abbasis fate.
For almost three years the 24-year-old college dropout from Croydon, south London, has been held without charge at Camp Delta, the maximum security prison used by America to detain suspected Islamic terrorists.
Since first being informed of his incarceration by The Sunday Times in January 2002, Abbasis mother, Zumrati Juma, has tirelessly campaigned for his release.
Abbasi, she and his lawyers argue, is nothing more than one of a small group of idealistic young Muslim men who found themselves caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.
But the Abbasi who sat before the tribunal panel last month was not that. Unclassified US government papers filed in a district court in Washington DC which outline the tribunal proceedings reveal for the first time that Abbasi was, and remains, a hardline Islamist.
Based on interrogations of the former student and other captured suspects, the Americans claim Abbasi underwent extensive military training at terrorist camps in Afghanistan, met senior Al-Qaeda officials and was present when Osama Bin Laden visited the camps on at least two occasions.
More disturbingly, he is alleged to have volunteered for a suicide mission and is thought to have been captured on the front line, defending the airport at Kandahar, the Talibans former stronghold in southwest Afghanistan.
The case against Abbasi has not been contested in anything resembling a British court of law and he claims that much of his evidence was extracted under duress. However, the US papers obtained by The Sunday Times appear to leave little doubt about Abbasis commitment to jihad and his antipathy towards America.
-snip-
(Dipesh Gadher in The Sunday Times, November 21, 2004)
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Good for the Sunday Times.
Glad to see a Brit media outlet giving the US fair treatment.
Let the Brits have him. But then don't complain when he blows up Westminster Abbey.
Hang or shoot the SOB and dump him in the ocean as chum.
" Feroz Abbasi "
- a Briton ??