From Andy Worthington Author and Journalist
By Andy Worthington

The story of Guantánamo detainee Lofti Lagha, which I first broke here, and subsequently reported on here and here, reached a predictably sad conclusion last week when he was sentenced to three years in prison. The 39-year old, who had traveled to Afghanistan in 2001 after several years as an illegal immigrant in Italy, was captured in Pakistan at a time when bounty payments for Arabs were commonplace, and has claimed that his fingers, which were affected by frostbite as he escaped Afghanistan through the Tora Bora mountains, were unnecessarily amputated while he was in prison at the US airbase in Bagram.

Lagha’s trial – four months after his repatriation from Guantánamo – bore all the hallmarks of an unjust show trial. Allegations that he received military training in Afghanistan and fought with the Taliban regime were dropped, and he was, instead, convicted of “associating with a criminal group with the aim of harming or causing damage in Tunisia,” even though, as the Associated Press reported, the Tunisian authorities “did not name the group that Lagha was said to participate in or specify what its planned violence was,” and even though Lagha himself insisted during the trial, “I haven’t been involved in any terrorist activity. I went to Afghanistan for work.” Speaking after the verdict was announced, his lawyer, Samir Ben Amor, said he was “disappointed” with the verdict, and stated that he would lodge an appeal, adding, “We thought he would get justice in his own country after what he endured at Guantánamo.”

While casting the regime of Tunisian dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in a predictably bad light, the verdict also does nothing to assure critics of the US administration that the “diplomatic assurances” received from Tunisia regarding the status of detainees returned from Guantánamo are anything other than worthless. This was, after all, a man that the US authorities had cleared for release after over five years in custody, as close to an admission of wrongful arrest as the notoriously unapologetic Bush regime ever gets.

Read more Imprisonment