Army News, opinions, editorials, news from Iraq, photos, reports - Army Times

Gitmo detainee charged in attempted murder

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico — The U.S. military has filed an attempted murder charge against a Guantanamo Bay detainee who allegedly threw a hand grenade into a vehicle carrying two American soldiers and an interpreter in Afghanistan, according to documents released Thursday.

Mohammed Jawad, who has denied the accusation, is the fourth detainee chosen for prosecution under a system authorized by Congress last year to hold war crime tribunals at the U.S. Navy base in southeast Cuba.

Military prosecutors charged the detainee with attempted murder stemming from the attack in Kabul on Dec. 17, 2002, that injured two soldiers and the Afghan interpreter.

At a hearing last year at Guantanamo, Jawad said he falsely confessed to local Afghan police who had arrested him because they tortured him.

“I told them anything they wanted me to say. By forcing me, beating me and scaring me, I confessed,” he told the military panel charged with determining whether he was eligible for transfer or release from Guantanamo.

Prosecutors are not seeking the death penalty, according to Navy Cmdr. Jeffrey Gordon, a Pentagon spokesman. No date has been scheduled for Jawad’s arraignment.

The military has indicated it intends to prosecute about 80 of the roughly 330 men held at Guantanamo on suspicion of links to terrorism, al-Qaida or the Taliban.

“The new charges are an indication that military commissions are moving forward,” Gordon said.

The military trials were thrown into limbo in June when military judges dismissed charges against two other detainees because they had not been declared alien unlawful enemy combatants by administrative hearings at Guantanamo. A U.S. military appeals court reversed the ruling in one of those cases last month, clearing the way for prosecutions to resume.

According to the transcript of last year’s hearing, Jawad said he had studied in Pakistan and entered Afghanistan to work as a laborer. He said he took a job clearing mines but denied that he’d learned to use grenades, automatic weapons and rocket launchers at a terrorist training camp.

He said he was at the scene of the 2002 grenade attack and could identify the assailant but had played no role himself.

“I don’t know where the bomb was thrown and where I got caught,” he said.