CAIRO, Egypt — A Saudi man released from Guantanamo after spending nearly six years inside the U.S. prison camp is now the No. 2 of Yemen’s al-Qaida branch, according to a purported Internet statement from the terror network.
The announcement, made this week on a Web site commonly used by militants, came as President Barack Obama ordered the detention facility closed within a year. Many of the remaining detainees are from Yemen, which has long posed a vexing terrorism problem for the U.S.
The terror group’s Yemen branch — known as “al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula” — said the man, identified as Said Ali al-Shihri, returned to his home in Saudi Arabia after his release from Guantanamo about a year ago and from there went to Yemen, which is Osama bin Laden’s ancestral home.
The Internet statement, which could not immediately be verified, said al-Shihri was the group’s second-in-command in Yemen, and his prisoner number at Guantanamo was 372.
“He managed to leave the land of the two shrines (Saudi Arabia) and join his brothers in al-Qaida,” the statement said.
Documents released by the U.S. Defense Department show that al-Shihri was released from the facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in November 2007 and transferred to his homeland. The documents confirmed his prisoner number was 372.
A Yemeni counterterrorism official would only say that Saudi Arabia had asked Yemen to turn over a number of wanted Saudi suspects who fled the kingdom last year for Yemen, and a man with the same name was among those wanted.
Yemen is a U.S. ally in the fight against terror, but it also has been the site of numerous high-profile, al-Qaida-linked attacks, including the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in the Gulf of Aden, which killed 17 American sailors.
Yemen’s government struggles to maintain order. Many areas of the California-size country are beyond government control and Islamic extremism is strong. Nearly 100 Yemeni detainees remain at Guantanamo, making up the biggest group of prisoners.
Al-Shihri’s case highlights the complexity of Obama’s decision to shut down the detention center within a year despite the absence of rehabilitation programs for ex-prisoners in some countries, including Yemen. The Pentagon also has said more former ex-detainees appear to be returning to the fight against the U.S. after their release.
Rep. Jane Harman, D-Calif., who heads the House Homeland Security subcommittee on intelligence, said the reports about al-Shihri should not slow the Obama administration’s determination to quickly close the prison.
“What it tells me is that President Obama has to proceed extremely carefully. But there is really no justification and there was no justification for disappearing people in a place that was located offshore of America so it was outside the reach of U.S. law,” she told CBS’s “The Early Show.”
But Rep. Pete Hoekstra of Michigan, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, criticized the executive order Obama signed Thursday to close the facility as “very short on specifics.”
Interviewed on the same program, he said there are indications that as many as 10 percent of the men released from Guantanamo are “back on the battlefield. They are attacking American troops.”
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