Toufiq Saber Muhammad Al Marwa’i

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Toufiq Saber Muhammad Al Marwa'i (also transliterated as Tawfiq Al-Murwai) is a citizen of Yemen, held in extrajudicial detention in the United States Guantanamo Bay detainment camps, in Cuba.^[1] His detainee ID number is 129. American intelligence analysts estimate that Al Marwa'i was born in 1976, in Al Dumaina, Yemen.

1 Identity
2 Combatant Status Review Tribunal
- 2.1 Allegations
3 Repatriation
4 References

[edit] Identity

While the US Department of Defense transliterates his name as Toufiq Saber Muhammad Al Marwa'i, The Yemen Times transliterate his name as Tawfiq Al-Murwai.^[2]

[edit] Combatant Status Review Tribunal

Initially the Bush administration asserted that they could withhold all the protections of the Geneva Conventions to captives from the war on terror. This policy was challenged before the Judicial branch. Critics argued that the USA could not evade its obligation to conduct competent tribunals to determine whether captives are, or are not, entitled to the protections of prisoner of war status.

Subsequently the Department of Defense instituted the Combatant Status Review Tribunal. The Tribunals, however, were not authorized to determine whether the captives were lawful combatants -- rather they were merely empowered to make a recommendation as to whether the captive had previously been correctly determined to match the Bush administration's definition of an enemy combatant.

To comply with a Freedom of Information Act request, during the winter and spring of 2005, the Department of Defense released 507 memoranda. Those 507 memoranda each contained the allegations against a single detainee, prepared for their Combatant Status Review Tribunals. The detainee's name and ID numbers were redacted from all but one of the memoranda. However 169 of the memoranda had the detainee's ID hand-written on the top right hand of the first page corner. When the Department of Defense complied with a court order, and released official lists of the detainee's names and ID numbers it was possible to identify who those 169 were written about. Toufiq Saber Muhammad Al Marwa'i was one of those 169 detainees.^[3]

[edit] Allegations

a. The detainee is associated with the Taliban:

In early November 2000, the detainee traveled from Yemen, through Pakistan, and into Afghanistan.
Once in Afghanistan, the detainee went to live in Kabul at a Taliban center, called the Said House, run by a man who spoke Arabic.
The detainee admitted that he spent approxiimately seven months in Northern Afghanistan as a cook for the Taliban.
The detainee fled Konduz, Afghanistan and headed for Mazir-E-Sharif ^[^sic], when the group of approximately 100 Arabs he was traveling with was captured by General Dostrum's ^[^sic] Northern Alliance forces on the ninth day of Ramadan, 2001.

[edit] Repatriation

Yemen's President, Ali Abdullah Saleh, demanded the release of the remaining Yemenis held in Guantanamo on December 23, 2006. ^[4] The Yemen Observer identified Mohammed Ahmed al-Asadi, Esam Hamid al-Jaefi and Ali Hussain al-Tais as three of the six Yemeni who had been repatriated the previous week. Al Asadi, the first of the six men to be released, on December 29, 2006, was asked to sign an undertaking promising to refrain from armed activity.^[5] On January 7, 2007 the Yemen Times identified two of the three remaining men as Tawfiq Al-Murwai and Muhassen Al-Asskari.^[2] Yemen's President, Ali Abdullah Saleh, said the men would be released as soon as Yemeni authorities had cleared them.