Two Somali detainees at Guantanamo search for new home

[Jacaylbaro]

WASHINGTON, DC, 02 April 2008 (VOA)--Two Somali terror suspects detained at the high-security US camp for enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba have been cleared for release, but remain in search of a suitable new home. Mohammed Hussein Abdullah and his son-in-law, Mohammed Suleyman Barre, were arrested in Pakistan, where they had refugee status, shortly after the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington. They are no longer under suspicion, but US authorities have delayed their release. One of them will meet with an attorney next week to try to determine where they want to go. It will be the prisoner’s first contact with the outside world in almost six years. Human Rights Watch director of terrorism and counter-terrorism Joanne Mariner says there is concern about returning them to Somalia’s breakaway region of Somaliland, where the two detainees have relatives.

 

“The government would send him home, except that Somalia is not really a place you can send people home to, and there should really be efforts made to resettle them either in Europe or back in Pakistan or in other countries,” she pointed out.

 

Somaliland declared its political independence from the Somali Republic in 1991, but has failed to win diplomatic recognition from any single country or international organization. Some reports say that this lack of recognition is delaying the two men’s release. However, Mariner says she thinks the long-running battles between Somalia’s Islamist rebels and the transitional government backed by Ethiopian troops, has been the main complicating factor.

 

“I don’t know if the Somali government is willing to take them, but Somalia is obviously a place we should not be returning them to right now. It’s in the middle of an armed conflict, and the two who were picked up in Pakistan actually have mandate refugee status, so they’re not supposed to be returned to Somalia,” she noted.

 

As many as four US-held detainees at Guantanamo prison have Somali origin. But Mariner says the other two, Gouled Hassan Dourad, arrested in 2004 and set to Guantanamo two years later, and Abdullahi Sudi Arale, who arrived there last year, are not likely to be released soon.

[Baluug]

F****ing a**holes should let them live in the US for what they've done to them.

[Faarax-Brawn]

Originally posted by Cadaan:

F****ing a**holes should let them live in the US for what they've done to them.

Really? You would live in a place that was responsible for all those atrocities? More so,if you were incharge of resettlement,would you let someone you tortured and humiliated live in your state? Duh,Revenge?? L0L!