PARIS: Abaseen Roshan was one of 17 young men, released all too quietly last month from the US prison at Guantanamo Bay, where they’d been incarcerated since the spring of 2002.
The tale is told by Abaseen’s father Sayed Roshan, head of aviation traffic for Afghan national airline Ariana, who affirmed to a reporter from Le Figaro, that “I don’t see why I should hide what happened to my son for, as far as I’m concerned, he’s innocent, indeed that is what his American captors affirmed to the Afghan police.”
Abaseen was arrested on April 10, 2002, at Gardez, in eastern Afghanistan, as he was ferrying passengers off in a taxicab, going, as he did regularly, from Kabul to Khost and back. “Stopped at a barricade at Gardez, the governor of Paktia province decided, for no reason, that Abaseen was a terrorist, and off he was sent to Guantanamo,” says Sayed, “where he underwent strenuous interrogations.”
A certificate presented him by Afghani police, but not by Abaseen’s US captors, affirms clearly that Abaseen was innocent all the while, but his release went unaccompanied by any formal US presentation of apologies for his wrongful capture and incarceration.
“Especially,” says Sayed Roshan, “my son ended up losing 50 per cent of his vision,” largely the result of the conditions of his imprisonment during ten months “in a cage, and when he was let out, it was every two weeks, and with heavy chains on his feet.”
“Can you imagine such a thing happening in the 21st century?” exclaims the elder Roshan, who adds that his son is still stunned by the experience, and for the moment remains prostrated in his parents’ house, unable to go outside and face the world, his dreams of one day becoming an engineer nipped in the bud, all because he found himself at the wrong police roadblock at the wrong time, driving a taxi for the only reason that he was trying to earn money to pay for his studies.
To add insult to injury, French political sources have revealed that US special forces in Afghanistan, where their war is officially over, continue to this day to indiscriminately arrest new “suspects,” and, in spite of the past mistakes made with the likes of Abaseen Roshan, take the newest alleged “sympathisers” of Al Qaeda off to their Bagram military base outside Kabul, with most of the young Afghanis ferried off to Guantanamo where they in turn are placed in the very same cages which housed Abaseen and his sixteen Afghan compatriots.