Sami al-Hajj Released!

Al Jazeera cameraman Sami al-Hajj has been released from the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay and has arrived in Sudan. His family was at the airport in the capital Khartoum early on Friday to welcome him home from more than six years in captivity. Al-Hajj was carried off the aircraft in a stretcher and taken to hospital. Sudan’s justice minister told Al Jazeera that al-Hajj was a free man and would not be arrested in Sudan.

The cameraman was seized by Pakistani intelligence officers while travelling near the Afghan border in December 2001. Despite holding a legitimate visa to work for Al Jazeera’s Arabic channel in Afghanistan, he was handed to the US military in January 2002 and sent to Guantanamo Bay. Al-Hajj, who is originally from Sudan, was held as an “enemy combatant” without ever facing a trial or charges.

Zachary Katznelson, a lawyer from the Reprieve organisation has worked on al-Hajj’s case since August 2005 and has visited him 10 times in Guantanamo Bay, the last time just three weeks ago.

“Al-Hajj is remarkably thin, he has been on hunger strike and forcibly fed through his nose while being strapped down, twice a day, for 16 months,” he said. “He looks like an ill man, he has problems with his kidneys, liver, blood in his urine and there are concerns that he may have cancer.” Katznelson said that the cameraman’s release was probably motivated by political concerns. “I think this is part of a larger picture between the United States and Sudan, that they are trying to bring those countries closer together,” he said.

Martin Mubanga, a former Guantanamo detainee, told Al Jazeera that al-Hajj had refused to be broken by his experience in Guantanamo Bay. “When I saw him in the last years [of my captivity] he became stronger as he took a stance against the American authorities,” he said.

Mubanga said that al-Hajj would not believe he was free until he was back on the ground with his son. “Only then will it probably begin to sink in that he is free, on the plane he’ll probably still be thinking he is in a dream, that it is not really happening.”

Al-Hajj’s wife, Asma Ismailov, spoke to Al Jazeera before she travelled to Sudan. “Now I can think differently, now I can plan my life differently, everything will be fine, God willing,” she said.

Good news and best wishes as he readjusts and gets treatment for what was done to him, this means that happily this sidebar badge

can be retired.