OSAMA BIN LADEN’S SUSPECTED BODYGUARD DIES

Sat 13 February 2021:

Ibrahim Othman Ibrahim Idris, 60, died on Wednesday in Port Sudan.

Christopher Curran, a lawyer who represents Sudanese interests in Washington, said he succumbed “to medical complications he had from Guantánamo.”

He was taken to the prison at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba on the day it opened as a suspected bodyguard of bin Laden and was then released by the Obama administration as too impaired to pose a threat to the US.

The New York Times revealed that the exact cause was not immediately known, but Idris had been a sickly shut-in at his mother’s home in his native country, in Port Sudan, according to another former Sudanese prisoner, Sami al-Haj, who asserted that Idris had been tortured at Guantanamo, at the US naval base there.

Idris was captured in Pakistan fleeing the Battle of Tora Bora in December 2001, three months after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.

He was initially thought to be part of bin Laden’s security detail, according to a leaked US military intelligence profile from 2008. He was never charged with a crime, and he denied the allegation.

Military medical records showed that Idris spent long stretches in the prison’s “behavioral health unit”, where an Army psychiatrist concluded that he had schizophrenia. He also developed diabetes and high blood pressure at the prison.

He was repatriated on Dec. 18, 2013, in a rare instance of the government’s choosing not to oppose a petition in federal court for the release of a Guantánamo prisoner.