Alleged al-Qaeda chief faces trial after 9 years’ detention

A SAUDI accused of being a leading al-Qaeda terrorist yesterday emerged from nine years’ confinement to face charges of planning a deadly attack on an American warship.

Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri did not enter a plea before the first of a new series of war crime tribunals at Guantanamo Bay, the prison established in Cuba by president George W Bush.

Nashiri, who has been subjected to CIA interrogation techniques his defence claim amount to torture, occasionally smiled as he replied to questions from the American judge.

The charges against Nashiri, 46, include murder in violation of the law of war in the 2000 suicide bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen, an attack which killed 17 crew members. It is alleged he took orders from Osama bin Laden and also set up the October 2002 bombing of the French supertanker MV Limburg, in which a crewman died. He is also accused of planning a failed attack on another warship, the USS The Sullivans in January 2000.

Yesterday, Nashiri was allowed to remain unshackled, declined an offer to exchange his white prison uniform for civilian clothes and said he wanted to keep all the members of his appointed legal team.

“At this moment these lawyers are doing the right job,” he told the judge. It was a low-key start to the start of a capital case against a prisoner who was held in a series of clandestine CIA prisons where he was subjected to the simulated drowning technique known as waterboarding, mock executions and other harsh interrogation.

Nashiri was captured in 2002 and held in a network of CIA-run prisons before he was sent to Guantanamo in 2006.

His lawyers argue a fair trial will be impossible, and the death penalty should be out of the question since he was tortured while held at CIA “black sites” .

“By torturing him and subjecting him to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, the US has forfeited its right to try him and certainly to kill him,” his defence team wrote in a court document. “Through the infliction of physical and psychological abuse the government has essentially already killed a man it seized almost ten years ago.”

Nashiri is the first Guantanamo prisoner to be charged with war crimes that carry a potential death sentence since president Barack Obama took office pledging to close the detention centre. That plan was thwarted after Congress reject a plan to move the prisoners to the US.

The trial is taking place under military commissions revised by Congress and Mr Obama’s administration but are still subject to criticism from lawyers and human rights groups.

The main focus in the case will be his treatment. Army Brigadier General Mark Martins, the new chief prosecutor, has said only statements given voluntarily can be used against defendants in military commissions with only a narrow exception for things said at the time of capture.