At Guantanamo, Caught in a Legal Trap

On Oct. 8, 2001, Bosnian police detained an Algerian, Belkacem Bensayah, who they believed might be Abu Maali. While searching his home, they found a piece of notepaper that listed, in a handwritten scrawl, what appeared to be a phone number in Pakistan and the name "Abu Zubeida."

The scrap of paper was considered a vital piece of evidence. It seemed to match the name of one of al-Qaeda's top leaders, a Palestinian named Abu Zubaydah, who had fought in the Balkans and was at the time serving alongside Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan.

Bensayah told police he had never before seen the note, which was found inside a borrowed library book, "The Tragedy of Immorality." Bosnian and U.S. investigators didn't believe him.

Later, U.S. investigators asserted they had phone records indicating Bensayah had called Afghanistan 70 times after Sept. 11 and accused him of being "the top al Qaeda facilitator" in Bosnia, court documents show. The phone records have not been publicly disclosed.

Police turned their attention to an acquaintance of their lead suspect, another Algerian, Saber Lahmar. A worker for a Saudi aid agency in Bosnia, the Saudi High Committee for Relief, Lahmar had another intriguing connection: His father-in-law had recently been hired as a janitor at the U.S. Embassy.

On Oct. 16, U.S. intelligence officers listened in on a wiretap they had placed on Lahmar's phone. According to court records, they heard him speaking "in code" about what they thought was a plan to attack the U.S. and British embassies in Sarajevo.

The next day, U.S. diplomats and officials from the CIA and FBI met with their Bosnian counterparts. The Americans told the Bosnians that they had closed the embassy for security reasons and made clear they wanted more arrests, according to Bosnian officials present at the meeting.

Over the next week, Bosnian police arrested Lahmar and four other Algerians: Ait Idr, Hadj Boudella, Mohamed Nechle and Lahkdar Boumediene. Most of the men have said they were friends who had met through their charity work.

Srdjan Dizdarevic, president of the Bosnian chapter of the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights, said U.S. officials exerted heavy pressure to round up suspects, threatening to withdraw U.S. peacekeeping troops if Bosnian officials didn't act.

"There was not a single piece of credible evidence against the Algerians," Dizdarevic recalled. "The Bosnian authorities couldn't find anything, and the Americans didn't turn over anything to back up their claims. But the threats from the Americans were enormous. There was a hysteria in their behavior."

Vijay Padmanabhan, a lawyer in the State Department's legal office for political and military affairs, confirmed that U.S. officials met with the Bosnians to discuss the embassy closing.

"We didn't threaten or intimidate the Bosnians into arresting these men," he said. "We provided the Bosnian government with intelligence information, and they took what they felt was the appropriate action based on that information." He declined to provide further details.