One evening in November 2001, an electrical engineer called Mohamedou Ould Salahi was visited at his home in Mauritania by officers of ordinary intelligence. They wanted to interrogate him. Salahi was first brought from Mauritania to Jordan, then to Afghanistan and finally to the Guantánamo Bay detention facility in Cuba, where he would be detained for free for 14 years – an experience he wrote about in his 2015 memoir. Guantánamo Diary, which has now been adapted into a film The Mauritanian.
In the first of two episodes about his story, Salahi tells Anushka Asthana about the torture he experienced in detention, and the series of events that brought him under suspicion in the first place. Salahi’s former guard Steve Wood describes how he formed an unlikely friendship with Guantánamo’s most valuable prisoner, and reflects on how that friendship led him to question his work and the whole “war on terror”. Wood’s friendship with Salahi is the subject of a new Guardian documentary from Bafter, My Brother’s Keeper.
Archive: Paramount, Wind-Up, AP, ABC7NY, US National Archive, Decca
Photo: Laurence Topham / The Guardian
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