A suspected bodyguard of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden has died.
Ibrahim Othman Ibrahim Idris, 60, died on Wednesday in Port Sudan.
He was taken to the prison at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba on the day it opened as a suspected bodyguard of bin Laden and was then released by the Obama administration as too impaired to pose a threat to the US.
Christopher Curran, a lawyer who represents Sudanese interests in Washington, said he succumbed “to medical complications he had from Guantánamo.”
The New York Times revealed that the exact cause was not immediately known, but Idris had been a sickly shut-in at his mother’s home in his native country, in Port Sudan, according to another former Sudanese prisoner, Sami al-Haj, who asserted that Idris had been tortured at Guantanamo, at the US naval base there.
Idris was captured in Pakistan fleeing the Battle of Tora Bora in December 2001, three months after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.
He was initially thought to be part of bin Laden’s security detail, according to a leaked US military intelligence profile from 2008. He was never charged with a crime, and he denied the allegation.
He was among 20 prisoners taken to Guantánamo on Jan. 11, 2002, the day the Pentagon opened its crude, open-air prison called Camp X-Ray as a detention and interrogation compound for “enemy combatants”.
A widely viewed Navy photograph from that day shows the men on their knees in orange jumpsuits, shackled at the wrists and blindfolded inside a barbed-wire pen.
Military medical records showed that Idris spent long stretches in the prison’s “behavioral health unit”, where an Army psychiatrist concluded that he had schizophrenia. He also developed diabetes and high blood pressure at the prison.
He was repatriated on Dec. 18, 2013, in a rare instance of the government’s choosing not to oppose a petition in federal court for the release of a Guantánamo prisoner.
His habeas corpus petition invoked domestic and international law, noting that “if a detainee is so ill that he cannot return to the battlefield, he should be repatriated.”
His lawyers described Idris as too sick to become a threat to anyone, and the US did not challenge that assertion.
“Given how ill he was, it was clear that at home with his family was where he would receive the best care,” Ian C. Moss, a former State Department diplomat who arranged for Idris’s transfer, said on Wednesday.
At the time, Sudan was still on the State Sponsor of Terrorism list. But because a federal court ordered his release, he could be returned.
