Chinmaya IAS Academy – Current Affairs Chinmaya IAS Academy – Current Affairs
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In their fight to get Abu Zubaydah released from the U.S. military detention facility, lawyers are trying to collate details of his stay in Karnataka More than 27 years after he abandoned his undergraduate studies in Mysuru to wage jihad against the Soviet-backed regime in Afghanistan, Zainalabdeen Mohammad Hussein Abu Zobaida’s links with the southern Indian city have become the subject of intense interest among a group of international lawyers and human rights groups. Arrested by the U.S. authorities in March 2002 and described by the then Bush administration as the “No. 3 in al-Qaeda” and accused of having links to the September 11 terrorist attacks on the U.S., the Saudi national of Palestinian descent, who is better known as Abu Zubaydah, is being held at the Guantanamo Bay detention centre in Cuba. The lawyers representing Zubaydah have, in recent months, been seeking to unearth more details about his stay in Mysuru while they await progress on a habeas corpus petition filed before the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. The petition seeks the release of their client along with 10 other Muslim men, who have been detained at Guantanamo Bay without charges or a trial. Subjected to “enhanced interrogation techniques” including waterboarding at the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) ‘black sites’, which later became the subject of extensive Congressional hearings and censure, Zubaydah has not been charged, according to his lawyers, with the CIA itself having conceded that he was not a part of the al-Qaeda.
