Five former Guantanamo detainees found not guilty in Kuwait

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Five former Guantanamo detainees found not guilty in Kuwait

May 21, 2006 05:59:00 pm

[JURIST] A group of former Guantanamo Bay [JURIST news archive] detainees were found not guilty by a Kuwaiti court Sunday of belonging to al Qaeda and fighting a friendly state. The five detainees, arrested in Afghanistan after Sept. 11, were released from Guantanamo [JURIST report] in November and put on trial in Kuwait after they were returned home.

During trial, the five men denied the charges and questioned the court's jurisdiction [JURIST reports] over persons accused of committing crimes abroad and the legitimacy of evidence collected by US interrogators at Guantanamo, suggesting that if the defendants were not innocent, they would not have been released. Last year, while still held at Guantanamo, the defendants said they had falsely confessed [JURIST report] to being Taliban or al Qaeda members in order to stop their torture, which they claimed included beatings with chains, electric shock and sodomy. Reuters has more.

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Same-sex marriages became legal in South Africa on November 30, 2006 as the country's Civil Union Act, 2006 went into effect, making South Africa the only country on the African continent to legalize same-sex marriage. Read the Civil Union Act, 2006.

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