Habibullah Habibullah died on December 4, 2002. Several U.S. soldiers hit the chained man with so-called "
peroneal strikes", or severe blows to the side of the leg above the knee. This incapacitates the leg by hitting the
common peroneal nerve. According to
The New York Times:
Dilawar in the
Reserve United States Army Military Police Corps Dilawar, who died on December 10, 2002, was a 22-year-old Afghan taxi driver and farmer who weighed 122 pounds and was described by his interpreters as neither violent nor aggressive. When beaten, he repeatedly cried "
Allah". The outcry appears to have amused U.S. military personnel. The act of striking him to provoke a scream of "Allah" eventually "became a kind of running joke", according to one of the MP's. "People kept showing up to give this detainee a common peroneal strike just to hear him scream out 'Allah'", he said. "It went on over a 24-hour period, and I would think that it was over 100 strikes." The
Times reported that:
Aafia Siddiqui/Prisoner 650 Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani citizen educated in the United States as a
neuroscientist, was suspected of the attempted assault and killing of U.S. personnel in Afghanistan. She disappeared in 2003 with her three children. She was allegedly detained for five years at Bagram with her children; she was the only female prisoner. She was known to the male detainees as "Prisoner 650". The media dubbed her the "
Mata Hari of al-Qaida" or the "Grey Lady of Bagram".
Yvonne Ridley says that Siddiqui is the "Grey Lady of Bagram" – a ghostly female detainee, who kept prisoners awake "with her haunting sobs and piercing screams". In 2005, male prisoners were so agitated by her plight, Ridley said, that they went on a hunger strike for six days. Siddiqui's family maintains that she was abused at Bagram.
Binyam Mohamed Mohamed immigrated to the U.K. from Ethiopia in 1994 and sought asylum. In 2001, he converted to Islam and travelled to Pakistan, followed by Afghanistan, to see if the Taliban-run Afghanistan was "a good Islamic country". U.S. authorities believed that he was a would-be bomber who fought alongside the
Taliban in Afghanistan. Pakistani immigration officials arrested him at the airport in April 2002 before he returned to the U.K., and Mohamed has said officials have used evidence gained through torture in sites in Pakistan, Morocco and Afghanistan between 2002 and 2004, before he was "secretly rendered" to the U.S.
Guantanamo Bay detention camp in Cuba. In October 2008, the U.S. dropped all charges against him. Mohamed was reported as very ill as a result of a hunger strike in the weeks before his release. In February 2009, Mohamed was interviewed by
Moazzam Begg, a fellow Bagram detainee and founder of
CagePrisoners, an organization to help released detainees. Mohamad identified a photo of Aafia Siddiqui as the woman whom he and other male detainees had seen at Bagram, known as "Prisoner 650".
Others Mohammed Sulaymon Barre, a Somali refugee who worked for a funds transfer company, described his Bagram interrogation as "torture". Barre said he was picked up and thrown around the interrogation room when he would not confess to a false allegation. He was put into an isolation chamber that was maintained at a piercingly cold temperature for several weeks, and deprived of sufficient rations during this period. As a result of this treatment, his hands and feet swelled, causing him such excruciating pain that he could not stand up. Zalmay Shah, a citizen of Afghanistan, alleges mistreatment during detention at Bagram air base. An article published in the May 2, 2007, issue of
The New Republic contained excerpts from an interview with Shah. ==Investigation and prosecution==