SARAJEVO: “We are in a country unknown to us and you can probably see on TV how they are treating us,” an inmate of the US Guantanamo Bay detention camp for radical Muslim suspects wrote to his wife living in Bosnia, where he was detained last year.

The date and several passages in the letter, written in Arabic, and which could only have come from the US detention base Guatanamo Bay on Cuba, have been blacked out by the US army censor.

Boudellah Hadz, a former Bosnian citizen of the Algerian origin, was arrested together with another five Algerians in Bosnia in October last year soon after the September 11 terrorist attacks in the United States. He is suspected of having planned attacks on the US and British embassies in Sarajevo.

One suspect is said to have spoken by mobile phone to terror mastermind Osama bin Laden, the man suspected of being behind the New York and Washington terror attacks. All the allegations are based on intelligence information.

Bosnia’s highest court was unable to find any hard evidence against the suspects and released them. A few hours later they were back in detention, this time at the hands of US authorities.

A source close to Bosnian government said US authorities were insistent in requesting extradition of the Algerians.

“Bosnia had no choice. We were unable to do anything else besides to give those people to Americans, even though we never found enough evidence against them,” said the source.

Soon after the early morning handover, US officials in Germany announced that the six would be sent to the Guantanamo Bay.

Since then Nadja Dizdarevic, a pale, 30-year-old mother of four children has been fighting a battle against a mightier adversary. She has received support from numerous international human rights organizations, mostly from the Helsinki Human Rights Committee and Amnesty International. These are insisting that even in time of war basic human rights must be adhered to and that a clear line must be drawn between justice and revenge.

“The position of the UNHCR (UN High Commission for refugees) was that there should be no extrajudicial removal of these persons,” the UNCHR’s Madeleine Rees said soon after Bosnian government handed over the group.

According to UNHCHR, the Algerian group should not have been extradited to some third party also because it had already begun a case before the Federation Appellate Court to get Bosnian authorities to reinstate the captives’ Bosnian citizenship, taken away in November last year soon after they were arrested.

Nadja Dizdarevic says she is prepared to go to the European Court for Human Rights in Strasbourg. She has hired a US-based lawyer to pledge for the group, but one was has so far not been allowed the access to his clients. Attorney Fahrija Karkin say he hopes the Bosnian Human Rights Chamber will order that the prisoners be sent back to Bosnia and compensated.

The last word goes to Dizdarevic: “I would go to the end of the world to find my husband and prove his innocence. I want to be able to respond to my children when they ask me - when the father will come home.”—dpa