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Writer in detention over Gitmo memoir

* Dost picked up in Sept
* His book accuses intelligence agency of having sold him to US

ISLAMABAD: The family of Afghan writer Abdul Rahim Muslim Dost, co-author of a recently published book chronicling the three years he spent incarcerated at Guantánamo Bay, believe that he has been detained by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency.

On Sept 29, just weeks after the Sept 3 publication of “The Broken Shackles of Guantánamo”, co-written with his brother and fellow Guantánamo detainee Badruz Zaman Badar, Dost was picked up as he left a mosque in Peshawar, where the family has lived for nearly 30 years.

Dost had previously said that ISI agents twice visited their home to try and persuade them against publishing their book.

Badar believes that Dost was detained by the ISI due to the book’s fierce criticism of its role in the United States-led war on terrorist groups and accusations that the agency sold them into American custody and looted their gemstone business.

Pakistani military and ISI officials have declined to comment either on Dost’s case or on the brothers’ comments on ISI conduct.

The brothers, who are both journalists, were arrested in Peshawar in November 2001, on charges of having ties to Al Qaeda, and transferred to the US military in Afghanistan before being taken to Guantánamo. Both brothers were freed, several months apart, in 2005.

During their incarceration, they were repeatedly questioned about Osama Bin Laden and Taliban chief Mullah Omar but insisted that they had never met the two “leaders”.

In a recent report, Amnesty International charged the Pakistani authorities of having violated “custodial safeguards” by not producing Dost in court and refusing him access to a lawyer and his family, including his nine children.

Badar, who has three children, now keeps a low profile running the family business. But he is keen that the book be translated from its original Pashto into Urdu, Arabic, Persian as well as French and English. ap

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