Palestinian held without trial takes case to Israel’s supreme court | World news | theguardian.com
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Palestinian held without trial takes case to Israel’s supreme court
Israel says Samir al-Baraq is an al-Qaida biological weapons expert who was planning attacks when he was arrested
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Harriet Sherwood in Jerusalem
theguardian.com, Monday 18 November 2013 09.13 GMT
Administrative detention
A Palestinian protester during 2012 demonstrations near Ramallah against the practice of ’administrative detention’. Photograph: Abbas Momani/AFP/Getty Images
Israel’s supreme court is set to rule on the continued detention of a Palestinian man accused of being an al-Qaida member who has been held in an Israeli jail without charge or trial for more than three years.
Samir al-Baraq has demanded to be released from “administrative detention”, the system by which Israel keeps security suspects locked up without going through a normal judicial process. The Israeli authorities are seeking a further six-month extension to the detention order.
Israel says Baraq, a Palestinian born in Kuwait, is a biological weapons expert who was planning attacks against Israeli targets when he was arrested in July 2010 while attempting to enter the country from Jordan.
According to court documents, Baraq studied microbiology in Pakistan, underwent military training in Afghanistan and was recruited in 2001 to al-Qaida by Ayman al-Zawahiri, who is the group’s leader today. In 2003, he spent three months in Guantánamo Bay, the US high-security jail in Cuba, and later spent five years in prison in Jordan.
Previous petitions against his administrative detention orders have been unsuccessful. In July, when extending the order, a military tribunal said: “The respondent is a senior al-Qaida operative with personal and direct ties to current commanders of the organisation. There can be no disagreement about the danger posed by him, and that his release would ignite military activities of the Salafi Jihad against the state of Israel.”
However, Baraq’s lawyer, Mahmid Saleh, told Army Radio: “If he is such a senior terrorist, then why hasn’t he been prosecuted? There is no evidence against him.”
According to the Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem, there were 135 Palestinian prisoners held on administrative detention orders in September 2013. There have been a series of hunger strikes by prisoners protesting over the orders.