Suleiman Abdullah Salim is a citizen of Tanzania who was held in extrajudicial detention, for five years, in secret CIA black sites. Salim was one of the individual the United States Senate Intelligence Committee's inquiry into the CIA's use of torture identified as having been subjected to the most brutal torture. According to James Risen, in the New York Times CIA interrogators tortured him, even though he was a black African man, and the Suleiman Abdullah Salim they had intended to capture was an ethnically Arabic man from Yemen.
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Life prior to capture
Salim was born in Stone Town, Tanzania. He took his first job, as a fisherman, when he was a young teenager. He worked in a clothing store, in Dar es Salaam. He later worked in Mombasa, as a water porter. He had to leave a job as a harbor pilot, in Kismayu, Somalia, due to resentment from the local warlord's militiamen. In 2003 he was working as a driver for an employee of Mohammed Dheere, a Somali warlord. Dheere's men accused him of owing Dheere money, and when he refused to be shaken down, they handed him over the CIA.
CIA custody
When the CIA first reported his apprehension they said he was a Yemeni, named "Suleiman Abdalla Salim Hemed". Salim said that, when he was first turned over to the Americans they accused him of finding a way to alter his appearance.
Post-release
Salim and two other men are suing the psychologists who designed the CIA's torture program.