Ex-Guantánamo Prisoner Abdul Rahim Rabbani Dies After 20 Years of Medical Neglect by the US and Inadequate Care Since His Release
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Sad news from Pakistan, where, on Friday November 1, former Guantánamo prisoner Abdul Rahim Ghulam Rabbani (ISN 1460) died at just 57 years of age. Abdul Rahim is on the right in the photo, with former Pakistani Senator Mushtaq Ahmad Khan in the center and Abdul Rahim’s younger brother Ahmed on the left.
Rohingya Muslims from Myanmar, the brothers had lived in Saudi Arabia, where their uncle was the imam of a mosque in Medina, and held Pakistani passports, but they were seized in Karachi during a number of house raids on September 11, 2002, and were then held and tortured in CIA “black sites” for a year and a half before arriving at Guantánamo in September 2004, where they were held without charge or trial for 18 and a half years until their release in February 2023.
The US authorities liked to claim that the brothers were “Al-Qaeda facilitators”, but they clearly had no evidence, as neither man was ever charged in the prison’s court system, the military commissions, and it seemed much more probable that they were, as they attested, a chef and a taxi driver. Nevertheless, they were repeatedly recommended for ongoing imprisonment without charge or trial by various high-level government review processes until May 2021, when Abdul Rahim was recommended for release by a Periodic Review Board, with a similar recommendation for Ahmed following in October 2021.
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