Arrested Karachi, Pakistan Name Redha al-Najar Status Held in Bagram | ISN 1466 Citizenship Tunisia | |
Charge(s) No charge (extrajudicial detention) | ||
Detained at Parwan Detention Facility | ||
Redha al-Najar is a citizen of Tunisia that was held in US custody in the Bagram Theater Internment Facility. He is notable for being one of a very small number of the detainees held in Bagram to have had a writ of habeas corpus submitted on his behalf.
Time magazine reports he was captured at his home in Karachi, Pakistan in May 2002. Time reports he spent two years in the CIA's black sites, before being transferred to Bagram.
Mr. al-Najar is represented by Barbara Olshansky of Stanford University's International Human Rights Clinic, Tina Monshipour Foster of the International Justice Network, and Sylvia Royce in association with the International Justice Network.
Mr. al-Najar was not allowed to send a letter until some time in 2003.
On January 15, 2010, the Department of Defense complied with a court order and published a heavily redacted list of Detainees held in the Bagram Theater Internment Facility. There were 645 names on the list, which was dated September 22, 2009. One of the names was Ridha Ahmad Najjar. Historian Andy Worthington, author of the The Guantanamo Files, asserted that this was another transliteration of Redah al-Najar, who he said was captured in May 2002 in Karachi, Pakistan. Worthington reported he was held in the CIA's "dark prison", the and several other CIA black sites, including the "Panjshir prison", and two prisons named "Rissat prison" and "Rissat prison 2". al-Najar's incarceration was not revealed to the International Committee of the Red Cross and he was "...forced to spend 22 hours each day with one or both wrists chained to an overhead bar, for two consecutive days, while wearing a diaper." The United States government is expected to file its response to a petition for a writ of certiorari on behalf of Mr. al-Najar in the Supreme Court on December 5, 2014.
On December 9, 2014, the United States Senate Intelligence Committee published the names of 39 individuals tortured by the CIA in its archipelago of black sites. An individual named Ridha Ahmad Najar was listed as one of individuals the CIA tortured.
On December 15, 2014, the Washington Post published an op-ed by Tina M. Foster, one of Najar's lawyers. In the article she wrote about how a whole section of the Intelligence Committee's report was devoted to Najar. She listed all the torture techniques the CIA used on him, and asserted that the CIA tortured him for nearly 700 days.