Al-Nashiri, charged with orchestrating the 2000 bombing of the destroyer USS Cole, is currently held in the US Navy Base in Guantanamo, Cuba. Tried before a military commission at Guantanamo, he may face the death penalty if convicted.
An expert’s opinion issued in the course of the commission proceedings said that al-Nashiri had been subject to torture – mental, physical and sexual.
Polish Prosecutor General Andrzej Seremet commented that the ruling of the US judge would not influence in any way the ongoing domestic investigation into CIA secret prisons in Poland.
Let us remind our readers that the probe was launched in 2008 and is currently conducted by the Appellate Prosecutor’s Office in Kraków. So far, Polish prosecutors have officially awarded victim status to three Guantanamo detainees: Abu Zubaydah, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri and Walid bin Attash. However, the authorities have refused to recognise Mustafa al-Hawsawi, another Guantanamo prisoner, as a victim in the pending investigation. In January 2014 The Washington Post wrote that in 2003 Poland reportedly received 15 million dollars from US authorities to host the secret prison in Stare Kiejkuty.
Abu Zubaydah and al-Nashiri applied to the European Court of Human Rights, alleging that they had been illegally detained and tortured in the CIA black site in Stare Kiejkuty, Poland.
