Last update - 00:00 06/11/2006
Israel frees Pakistani suspected of involvement in global jihad
By Yossi Melman, Haaretz Correspondent
The Shin Bet Security Service on Monday released from jail a Jordanian-born Pakistani who had been detained in Israel for 50 days on suspicions of involvement in a terror network affiliated with global jihad.
Marwan Ibrahim Ali Jabur, whose parents are Palestinian, spent the last two and a half years under detention in Pakistan, the United States, Jordan and Israel. He was released to relatives in the Gaza Strip a day before the court was scheduled to consider extending his remand.
As revealed in Haaretz last week, Jabur was first arrested in Pakistan in May 2004, where he was interrogated under difficult and torturous conditions. He was transferred to U.S. forces after 15 days and flown to an unknown loation, which he described as a place where "music was playing 24 hours a day and the soldiers would beat us nonstop." This description indicates Jabur was apparently held at the Guantanamo Bay detention center in Cuba, where the United States holds Al-Qaida operatives. From there he was flown to Jordan under American escort, where he spent a month and a half under interrogation before being imprisoned at the Shin Bet security service wing at the Kishon jail.
The Shin Bet confirmed it was holding him on suspicion of terror activity and has stated his custody was subject to court approval. All information came from the statement Jabur signed and the conversations he conducted with Mahajna and another lawyer, Maher Talhami, who is also dealing with the case.
Jabur was born on in 1976 Amman, Jordan, to Palestinian refugees from the Gaza town of Khan Yunis, grew up in Saudi Arabia, and moved to Pakistan at the age of 19 to study mechanical engineering.
There he met and married a Pakistani woman and they had three children. He became a Pakistani citizen - he holds both a Pakistani passport and a Palestinian ID. He completed his engineering internship in France, after which he returned to Pakistan and visited Afghanistan several times. This travel pattern, which characterizes quite a few Al-Qaida and international terror operatives who have been arrested since the September 11, 2001 attacks, aroused the suspicion of the Pakistani security services.
Jabur provided several versions of the circumstances of his arrest. The first appears in the statement he signed, in which he states he was arrested on May 9, 2004: "I was arrested by Pakistani forces because I was a foreigner and an Arab in Pakistan, under the excuse that I belonged to terrorist Islamist groups, which is not true."
He did, however, go to Afghanistan in 1999 and train there along with mujahideen. The training lasted for three months and focused primarily on using a pistol and a Kalashnikov. Jabur was supposed to be sent to fight in Chechnya along with the other trainees, but never made it there.
Once he returned to Pakistan, Jabur went back to Afghanistan 10 days after the September 11 attacks, this time to fight the Americans. He says this did not work out, and he returned to Pakistan two months later to complete his studies. During that period, he met with fighters who turned out to be senior jihad activists. He was arrested by Pakistani security services after someone informed on him.
In his statement, Jabur makes no complaints of torture against the Shin Bet, in contrast to what he said he underwent at the hands of Pakistani and American interrogators.
He told investigators and his lawyer that he "saw sunlight for the first time when they brought me to Israel," adding, "it was also the first time I saw the Red Cross in two and a half years."