Hamed Abderrahaman Ahmad

Hamed Abderrahman Ahmad (born 1974), also known as Ahmad Abd al Rahman Ahmad, is a Spanish national born in Ceuta, who was captured and arrested by Pakistani soldiers in Pakistan in the fall of 2001 during the United States intervention in Afghanistan. He was transferred to United States military custody and held at Guantanamo Bay detention camp as a suspected enemy combatant from early 2002 to February 14, 2004, the only Spanish citizen to be detained there. His internment serial number (ISN) was 267.

In 2004, the United States allowed his extradition to Spain to face terrorism charges, based on confessions made while in US custody. Spanish authorities alleged that Abderrahman Ahmad was a member of a Spanish al-Qaeda cell. Ahmad was convicted of those charges by the High Court in 2005 and sentenced to six years in prison. Review of the case in an appeal to the Spanish Supreme Court resulted in the conviction being overturned in July 2006, as based on evidence that may have been obtained through torture by American interrogators. Such evidence is inadmissible in Spanish courts.

Early life Hamed Abderrahaman Ahmad was born to a Muslim family in Ceuta, a Spanish enclave in North Africa. As a young man, he worked in construction when jobs were available. According to Reuters, the Supreme Court found that the Spanish High Court, which had originally convicted Ahmad, had not taken into account his right to the presumption of innocence. The Court said that evidence collected at Guantanamo "should be declared totally void and, as such, non-existent."

Garzón, speaking of the evidence against Ahmad, which was supplied to Spain by United States intelligence officials, said that he was convicted without evidence from Guantanamo:

Everything obtained from there [Guantanamo] was useless because it went against the rules. Initial accounts incorrectly said that Ahmad was one of the arrested men. The press reported that the arrested men were associated with the Moroccan Islamic Combat Group, according to the Interior Ministry.

The Jamestown Foundation described the group as grassroots jihadist; areas of concern by Interior Ministry officials were that the group was trying to recruit Spanish soldiers of Muslim origin who were born in Ceuta, and that they were trying to build on friction resulting from the non-renewal of contracts of some Muslim military members.

Torture claims investigation On April 29, 2009, that Spanish investigating magistrate Baltazar Garzon initiated a formal investigation into whether confessions from Ahmed and three other former Guantanamo captives were the result of the use of abusive interrogation techniques by the United States. Spain had originally brought charges against these four men, who claimed having suffered torture during US interrogation. Ahmad and the other three men: Lahcen Ikassrien, Jamiel Abdul Latif al Banna and Omar Deghayes, had previously faced charges in Spanish courts, based on confessions they made while in US custody. Their charges had been dropped based on their claims that their confessions were false and obtained through coercive interrogation techniques.