You are here: Home / Projects / The Guantánamo Testimonials Project / Testimonies / Testimonies of the Prisoners / Always in custody, Guantanamo terror suspect's odyssey seems to know no end

Always in custody, Guantanamo terror suspect's odyssey seems to know no end

Associated Press
By Maria Danilova
June 30, 2007


MOSCOW – Rasul Kudayev suffered inside a Taliban jail, and has been a prisoner too of Afghanistan's anti-Taliban resistance. Then he was held at Guantanamo Bay, only to be sent home and rearrested in his native Russia.

Of at least nine former Taliban prisoners who also ended up at Guantanamo, perhaps none can match Kudayev's odyssey of incarceration.

The former champion wrestler was a young man when he left Russia's Kabardino-Balkariya region in 2000. His plan, he says, was to travel by road to Iran, to study at an Islamic university. Instead he was arrested by the Taliban on a road near the western Afghan city of Herat, accused of being a Russian spy.

Following the U.S. invasion in late 2001, Kudayev fell into the hands of the American-allied Northern Alliance, who imprisoned him in the notorious Qalai Janghi fort near the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif. It was at this same fort that John Walker Lindh, known as the American Taliban, was arrested following a bloody prisoner uprising.

Kudayev, shot in the hip during the uprising, was turned over to the Americans and taken to Guantanamo Bay. He charges that U.S. guards tortured and humiliated him from the start. The U.S. military denies there is any torture at Guantanamo.

Kudayev says he was beaten, kicked and injected with unknown drugs. He says he witnessed the desecration of the Quran, was stripped naked and forced to go to the bathroom in front of female guards, and was touched sexually by scantily clad women interrogators. He was interrogated by other guards at all hours of the night and asked the same questions over and over again.

What connection did you have to the Sept. 11 attacks? Do you know Osama bin Laden? Where did you fight for the Taliban?

“No, no, no. I told them they were silly questions,” said Kudayev.

While there is no way for The Associated Press to independently verify Kudayev's account, it matches many of the allegations of mistreatment leveled by other Guantanamo prisoners.

In early 2004, he and several other Russian prisoners were released and sent back to Russia, where they were held for several months at the high-security Pyatigorsk prison.

Even after his release, his family says, he was harassed by Russian security.

In November 2005, he was arrested on suspicion of participating in a raid by Islamic militants on police and other government buildings in the North Caucasus city of Nalchik.

His mother, Fatima Tekayeva, told the AP that her son has been subjected to electric shock treatment, had pieces of his ears cut off and had sharp objects stuck in his eye. He broke down and confessed to being a part of the plot, though he now says he was home at the time and had nothing to do with it.

Zackary Katznelson, a lawyer at Reprieve, a London-based human rights group representing about three dozen Guantanamo detainees, said Kudayev was at home and severely ill at the time of the Nalchik attack. He said at least four Russian lawyers assigned to Kudayev have been ordered off the case by the Russian prosecutor's office.

Family members say prosecutors have also accused the former Guantanamo inmate of being a British or American spy.


Associated Press reporter Paul Haven reported from Madrid, Spain; Maria Danilova from Moscow.

Get original here.