Former Gitmo prisoner says abuse photos exist - Marine Corps News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Marine Corps Times

Former Gitmo prisoner says abuse photos exist

WASHINGTON — A former Guantanamo Bay prisoner says the U.S. has photographs of him being beaten during his detention and has asked a judge to preserve the evidence.

Binyam Mohamed says guards at the U.S. facility beat him in May 2006 after he refused to come out of his cell for fingerprinting and an eye scan. He says he resisted because his lawyers had advised him not to give any samples without consulting them first.

Mohamad, an Ethiopian native and British resident, was accused of plotting to explode a “dirty bomb” in the U.S., but the charges were eventually dropped. He was released from the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in February and returned to Britain.

A Pentagon spokesman, Cmdr. Jeffrey D. Gordon, said repeated internal reviews showed no evidence that Mohamed was mistreated while in U.S. custody.

Mohamed’s attorneys provided a copy of an affidavit, first reported Sunday by Britain’s Guardian newspaper, they say he filed along with a sealed motion to the U.S. District Court in Washington last month. In it, Mohamed says he has seen one photograph of himself that was taken after the cell extraction, in which he says five or six guards “beat me up very badly” and later cut off half his beard and subjected him to a “humiliating” anal cavity search.

He said the photo shows swelling from a hand being shoved into his nose and a mark on his forehead from being slammed into the concrete floor. He said he got a copy of the photo and turned it over to his attorney during a visit at Guantanamo and was told it would be classified.

“I believe that the world has the right to see this photograph,” Mohamed said in the affidavit. “The authorities have consistently denied that I have been abused, and this is physical evidence that I am telling the truth, and they are not.”

The Justice Department responded in a court filing that Mohamed’s motion is unnecessary because the government is preserving detainee information.

He said he knows other photos were taken, including some of abuse while, he said, he was detained in Morocco after the CIA took him there.