Mohammed Saad Iqbal Madni

Originally detained in Jakarta, Mohammed Saad Iqbal Madni was rendered to torture in Egypt via Diego Garcia, and subsequently held in Bagram and Guantanamo Bay.

Madni was detained on 9 January 2002 at the request of the CIA after they claimed to have discovered a link to Richard Reid, the so-called British ‘shoe bomber’.

On 11 January 2002, with no judicial oversight, Madni describes being pushed aboard an unmarked, US-registered Gulfstream V jet at a military airport in Jakarta, and taken to Cairo.

After 92 torturous days in Cairo he being taken to Bagram Airforce Base and then Guantanamo Bay, where he remained until his release in August 2008.

Madni has persistently denied any connection with Richard Reid. In his Combatant Status Review Tribunal he maintained that he was betrayed by one of four radical Islamists whom he met by accident: ‘After I went to Indonesia, I got introduced to some people who were not good. They were bad people. Maybe I can say they were terrorists. When someone gets introduced to someone, it is not written on their foreheads that they are bad or good’.

The entire, embarrassing basis for Madni’s capture, rendition and torture was that Madni was, in the words of one of his uncles, a young man who ‘had a childish habit of trying to portray himself as important’, and had simply made something up, that bombs could be hidden in his shoes, to impress his new friends in Jakarta.

The comment was picked up by Indonesian intelligence agents and relayed to the CIA, who picked Madni up after Richard Reid’s failed shoe bomb attack a few weeks later.

A US intelligence official confirmed Madni’s uncle’s account, calling Madni a ‘blowhard’ who ‘wanted us to believe he was more important than he was.’  

A Washington Post report of March 2002 speaks of eye-witnesses at that time seeing a man being bundled aboard an unmarked, US-registered Gulfstream V jet at a military airport in Jakarta, which took him to Cairo.

This is further corroborated by Eurocontrol flight-logs, which were not released until many years after the first reports of Madni’s rendition, showing the movements of a well known rendition plane Gulfstream V with tail-number N379P, which has been dubbed “the torture taxi” by journalists and plane spotters around the world.

The New York Times, which published an interview with Madni soon after his release in August 2008, reports that ‘during the flight to Cairo, Mr. Iqbal said, he was bleeding from his nose, mouth and ears, and was unable to move because shackles wound tightly around his body.’

Madni has since told Reprieve that the plane stopped over once en-route to Egypt, and that some cameramen came into the plane and took pictures of him.

In the long flight across the Indian Ocean from Jakarta to Cairo, a stop-over on Diego Garcia would be eminently logical: as the grandfather of the unsuccessful 2008 presidential candidate, US Admiral John S McCain (1884–1945,) once put it, ‘as Malta is to the Mediterranean, Diego Garcia is to the Indian Ocean – equidistant from all points’

Madni says he arrived in Egypt on 11 January 2002, at 11:30am. When the plane landed, he was told he was in Cairo. He was assigned a basement room like “a grave,” about 6 feet by 4 feet, he said, and was kept there for 92 torturous days. Madni said that on January 11, 12 and 20, 2002, he was interrogated for 12 to 15 hours on each occasion. He described his interrogators as Egyptians, but also noted that there were other men in the room whose faces were covered and who did not speak, but who passed notes with questions to the Egyptians.

Eurocontrol flight logs show that Madni’s rendition plane stopped over in Cairo for six days after dropping him, before returning to Washington via Prestwick, again utilizing UK territory. It is possible therefore that some of the US rendition crew were the masked men Madni describes being present at the interrogations on 11 and 12 January 2002, before flying home.

Madni told the New York Times that his Egyptian captors tried to torture a confession out of him, and that when he told them that he had never been to Afghanistan nor had he met Usama Bin Laden, they responded by giving him electric shocks and forcing him to take drugs: “I cry and I yell,” he said. “Also they gave me brain electric shocks.” He said he was forced to consume liquids that were laced with drugs “so you don’t know what you are talking about.’

One witness who may be able to corroborate Madni’s account of what happened in Egypt is Mamdouh Habib, whose detention overlapped with Madni's.

A Russian prisoner released from Guantanamo in 2004, Rustam Akhmyarov confirmed that Madni told him of his time ‘in an underground cell in Egypt, where he never saw the sun and where he was tortured until he confessed to working with Osama bin Laden,’ and added that he ‘recalled how he was interrogated by both Egyptian and US agents in Egypt and that he was blindfolded, tortured with electric shocks, beaten and hung from the ceiling.’

Madni told Reprieve that in April of 2002, the Americans flew him to Bagram; again, Eurocontrol flight-logs exactly match Madni’s recollection. This time Madni was flown via a joint US/German airbase near Tashkent, where he changed planes before being taken onto Bagram.

Madni describes being held in Bagram for almost a year for further interrogation; he was shackled and handcuffed in a small cage with other detainees and, for a period of six months, shifted from cell to cell every few hours so that he was deprived of sleep. ‘A C.I.A. person said, ‘We forgive you; just accept you met Osama bin Laden.’ I said, ‘No, I’m not going to say that.’ ‘

Madni arrived at Guantánamo on March 23, 2003; fellow prisoners agree that he was in a particularly bad mental and physical state.

Rustam Akhmyarov recalled that he was ‘was passing blood in his faeces,’ and recalled that he overheard US officials telling him, ‘we will let you go if you tell the world everything was fine here’.

Mamdouh Habib recalls how Madni pleaded for human interaction, saying, ‘Talk to me, please talk to me … I feel depressed … I want to talk to somebody … Nobody trusts me’.

On the 191st day of his incarceration, according to Madni’s own account, he attempted to commit suicide. Habib confirms that Madni tried to hang himself twice, and went on three hunger strikes.

British citizens released in 2004, Rhuhel Ahmed, Asif Iqbal and Shafiq Rasul, also recalled Madni in Guantánamo, saying that ‘he had had electrodes put on his knees, and ‘something had happened to his bladder and he had problems going to the toilet,’ but explained that he had been told by interrogators that he would not receive treatment unless he cooperated with them, in which case he would be “first in line for medical treatment’. 

Madni finally returned home to Pakistan in August 2009, flown on an American military aircraft. He was admitted to a hospital for treatment, and then questioned for three weeks at a safe house by Pakistani intelligence officers before being sent back to his family in Lahore.

“It was like a new life for me,” he said. “I was born again. There is no word to explain.”

As a result of his experience in US secret prisons, Mr Madni is now unable to walk unaided and suffers debilitative psychological scarring.