Mohamedou Slahi was born in Mauritania. He left at the age of eighteen on a scholarship to study in Germany. In the early 1990s, he interrupted his studies and went to Afghanistan to join al-Qaeda units fighting—with American support—the Soviet-backed government in Kabul. He returned to Germany in 1992, completing his engineering degree and living and working first in Germany and then, for a few months, in Montreal. After his November 2001 apprehension by a Jordanian commando team, he was held in isolation and interrogated for the next seven and a half months before they concluded he had had no involvement with the Millennium plot. Nevertheless, a CIA rendition team captured him and on August 5, 2002, he was incarcerated at Guantánamo. Despite being cleared by multiple courts and foreign governments, he remained imprisoned. He has never been charged with a crime. |
