A French court on Wednesday rejected a request by four former Guantanamo prisoners to be freed from jail while awaiting trial in France, judicial officials said. The men, who were released from the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, on July 27, have been placed in various Paris-area prisons while authorities here investigate them. Defense lawyers argued that jailing was unjust and lodged an attempt to have them released. A Paris court gave an initial rejection of the request Wednesday, though it has until Aug. 20 for a final decision, officials said.
The four - Mourad Benchellali, Imad Kanouni, Nizar Sassi and Brahim Yadel - were captured in the U.S.-led campaign that toppled the hard-line Taliban regime in Afghanistan. Each spent more than two years at Guantanamo. "Their only wish today is to be freed and released to kill again their families," said Jean-Baptiste Rozes, the lawyer for Yadel.
French authorities here struggled for months to secure the men's return home from Guantanamo and are still negotiating the cases of three other Frenchmen held at the lockup in Cuba. Anti-terrorism judges have placed the four men under investigation, a step toward formal charges, for "criminal association with a terrorist enterprise." Investigators suspect they frequented groups that planned terror attacks in Europe. Several of the men confessed to training in military camps where they learned to use explosives and weapons, officials said.
Sassi, 22, and Benchellali, 24, are also under investigation for using false documents. The two are childhood friends who grew up in a tough suburb outside the central city of Lyon and went to Afghanistan together in June 2001 with stolen passports, officials say. They were arrested in December of that year and brought to Guantanamo. The two have described mistreatment at the hands of U.S. authorities at Guantanamo, such as being threatened with dogs, struck in their cells or given sleeping medications, their lawyers have said.
| Of course, no one has ever been abused in a French prison. Well, there was that whole Devil's Island thing, but we don't talk about that. |
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