At Guantanamo, Lakhdar Boumediene was only the 'number 10005'

The Algerian Lakhdar Boumediene, who has been allowed in France after more than seven years at Guantanamo as ...number 10005..., told the daily ...Le Monde... his sufferings in the American prison, where he suffered abuse during interrogation during several years.

•     Number 10005: “It was my name there. That's how called me. Not Lakhdar Boumediene,” says the former inmate, who arrived May 15 in France, where he was joined by his wife and two daughters.
  
      “Of course, I did not recognize them,” said Boumedienne, 42, about his children. He was among the first prisoners who arrived at Guantanamo prison, opened in January 2002 on a U.S. military base in Cuba by President George W. Bush.
  
      Arrested in the fall of 2001 with five other Algerians in Bosnia, Boumediene was suspected of masterminding an attack against the U.S. Embassy in Sarajevo.
  
      He was finally acquitted through the U.S. courts in November 2008, but remained locked.
  
      The Algerian has been for more than two years on hunger strike to protest for his innocence, and was force-fed by his jailers.
  
      He says: “Wake up at 5 am for morning prayer. then we return to the cell, at 6 am, the guards come for you, they make you sit on a chair, hands and feet shackled, and they feed you by force by intubation in the nasal passages.
  
      The detainee, who could not talk to anyone, stopped his hunger strike twice; the day of the Obama victory in November 2008, and the day that American judges have bleached him.
  
      One of his worst memories was in February 2003, when he was interrogated for 16 days and 16 nights. “It began at midnight and lasted until 5 o'clock in the morning. It stopped a few hours then it started again. After the third or fifth night, I was examined by a doctor of the army jailers who told them that everything was fine and that they could continue” he recounted.
  
      Some 200 men are still held at Guantanamo, symbol of the prison abuses in the war against terrorism, of George W. Bush and that President Barack Obama has pledged to close.
      
      
  Ennaharonline/ M. Oudina