Kuwait Times

Published Date: December 18, 2008

SARAJEVO: An Algerian-born man who has just been freed from Guantanamo described the US "war on terror" camp as the worst place on Earth, as leaders in his adoptive country Bosnia hailed his homecoming yesterday. "For almost seven years, I was at the end of the world, at the worst place in the world," Mustafa Ait Idir said in an interview published in the Bosnian newspaper Dnevni Avaz a day after arriving back in Sarajevo. "It would have been hard even if I had done something wrong (but) it is much harder
if one is totally innocent," he was quoted as saying.

Idir, along with two other detainees released from Guantanamo, Mohamed Nechla and Boudella Al-Hajj, arrived in Bosnia on Tuesday. The three, who were held at Guantanamo for almost seven years, were the first inmates to have been released by the US administration of President George W. Bush under a judge's orders. "You can well imagine how happy I am now. We all cried together," Idir said, referring to his wife and children.

On arrival at Sarajevo airport, the trio were questioned by police and then released to be reunited with their families. The three were among six Algerians arrested in late 2001 on suspicion of plotting an attack on the US embassy in Sarajevo. They had been living in Bosnia where they had been given nationality. In January 2002, although a Bosnian court ordered their release due to lack of evidence, they were transferred to the US camp at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.

But on November 20, more than seven years after the opening of the Guantanamo prison, a US judge acknowledged that five of the six men had been illegally detained and ordered their release, in the first such ruling. Lakhdar Boumediene and Saber Lahmar did not return to Bosnia with the other three since they had had their Bosnian citizenship revoked. Bosnian Muslim politicians welcomed the trio's return. "The United States found strength to admit that these people were not guilty and it is a great thing," S
ulejman Tihic, the head of Bosnia's strongest Muslim political grouping, the Party of Democratic Action (SDA), told Dnevni Avaz.

SDA vice-president Bakir Izetbegovic told the daily that "their release is notably good for Bosnia-Hercegovina because it confirms that there are no terrorist cells here". Izetbegovic, the son of Bosnia's late wartime Muslim president Alija Izetbegovic, said that those who handed the six over to US authorities should be held responsible. At the time the group was transferred to Guantanamo, Bosnia was run by a centre-left coalition led by the Social Democrats, currently the strongest opposition party.

Bosnia came under the spotlight after the September 11, 2001 attacks in the US due to the presence in the Balkan country of former Islamic fighters. Hundreds of fighters from Islamic countries joined the mainly Bosnian Muslim army during the 1992-1995 war that followed the country's break from Yugoslavia. Under a peace deal, they were ordered to leave, but some stayed on after obtaining Bosnian citizenship, mainly by marrying local women.

Meanwhile, former Bosnian prime minister Zlatko Lagumdzija said the United States had threatened to take the group by force unless they were handed over to international peacekeepers in 2002. By the decision to hand over the six, the government "avoided bloodshed that evening on the streets of Sarajevo," Lagumdzija, who testified on the matter before the US judge in Washington earlier this year, told reporters. - AFP