One evening in November 2001, an electrical engineer was appointed Mohamedou Ould Salahi he was visited at his home in Mauritania by plainclothes intelligence officers. They wanted him for questioning. Salahi was taken from Mauritania first to Jordan, then to Afghanistan, and finally to the Guantánamo Bay detention center in Cuba, where he will be detained without charge for 14 years – an experience he wrote about in his memoirs. its since 2015 The Guantánamo Journal, which has now been adapted into a film, The Mauritanian.
In the first of the two episodes about his story, he tells Salahi Anushka asthana about the torture he experienced in detention and about the series of events that brought him under suspicion in the first place. Salahi’s former guardian Steve Wood it describes how he formed an unlikely friendship with the most valuable one held by Guantánamo and reflects on how this friendship led him to question his job and the whole “war on terror”. Wood’s friendship with Salahi is the subject of a new Bafter Guardian documentary, My Brother’s Keeper.
Archive: Paramount, Wind-Up, AP, ABC7NY, US National Archives, Decca
Photos: Laurence Topham / The Guardian
Support The Guardian
The Guardian is editorially independent. And we want to keep our journalism open and accessible to all. But we increasingly need readers to fund our work.
Support The Guardian