Citizenship Malaysia ISN 10021 | Name Mohamad Amin | |
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Status Still held in Guantanamo Detained at Guantanamo Bay detention camp | ||
Mohamad Farik Amin, alias Zubair Zaid, is a Malaysian who is alleged to be a senior member of Jemaah Islamiyah and al Qaeda. He is currently in American custody in the Guantanamo Bay detention camp. He is one of the 14 detainees who had previously been held for years at CIA black sites. In the ODNI biographies of those 14, Amin is described as a direct subordinate of Hambali. Farik Amin is also a cousin of well-known Malaysian terrorist Zulkifli Abdhir.
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According to Time Magazine, Amin, Hambali, and Mohammed Nazir Bin Lep were detained and interrogated on the remote Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia, where they confessed to scouting out possible sites for terrorist bombings throughout Thailand. Time also reported that the three were captured together in central Thailand on August 11, 2003. The ODNI document says that Hambali and Bin Lep were captured together, but only that Amin was captured some time in 2003.
The Department of Defense announced on August 9, 2007 that all fourteen of the "high-value detainees" who had been transferred to Guantanamo from the CIA's black sites, had been officially classified as "enemy combatants". Although judges Peter Brownback and Keith J. Allred had ruled two months earlier that only "illegal enemy combatants" could face military commissions, the Department of Defense waived the qualifier and said that all fourteen men could now face charges before Guantanamo military commissions.
Scholars at the Brookings Institution, led by Benjamin Wittes, listed the captives still held in Guantanamo in December 2008, according to whether their detention was justified by certain common allegations:
Joint Review Task Force
On January 21, 2009, the day he was inaugurated, United States President Barack Obama issued three Executive orders related to the detention of individuals in Guantanamo. That new review system was composed of officials from six departments, where the OARDEC reviews were conducted entirely by the Department of Defense. When it reported back, a year later, the Joint Review Task Force classified some individuals as too dangerous to be transferred from Guantanamo, even though there was no evidence to justify laying charges against them. On April 9, 2013, that document was made public after a Freedom of Information Act request. Mohamad Farik bin Amin was one of the 71 individuals deemed too innocent to charge, but too dangerous to release. Obama said those deemed too innocent to charge, but too dangerous to release would start to receive reviews from a Periodic Review Board.
Periodic Review Board
The first review wasn't convened until November 20, 2013. As of 15 April 2016 29 individuals had reviews, but Mohammed Farik Amin wasn't one of them.