A childs plea: 'Please close Guantanamo jail so I can see my daddy and give him a hug'

A childs plea: 'Please close Guantanamo jail so I can see my daddy and give him a hug'
By Robert Verkaik, Law Editor
Published: 30 June 2007

Johaina Aamer recalls very little of the final precious moments she spent with her father before the bombs started falling in Afghanistan.

She remembers him pretending to be a lion and chasing her and her two brothers around the garden and then running for cover as the explosions crept closer. After that, her mind is blank.

But in paintings and pictures the nine-year-old has unlocked her subconscious to tell a horrifying story of the American invasion, her father's capture and his 2,000 days spent as a prisoner in Guantanamo Bay.

Her art reveals the anguish of an ordinary south London family who have been enduring their own private Guantanamo hell, not knowing why father and husband, Shaker Aamer, was taken from them. Two years ago, Johaina wrote a letter to Tony Blair saying that when she saw him on television with George Bush she switched channels.

The children decided not to post it in case it prejudiced their father's case. Today Johaina Aamer, her mother, Zin, 32, and her three brothers, Abdullah, eight, Abdul Rahman, six and Abdul Salam, five, are asking Gordon Brown, to end their misery and free Shaker, 40, and the other eight British residents still held in Guantanamo Bay.

"I would like him to close down the prison so my daddy can come home and I can give him a big hug," said Johaina.

Even then, it may be too late. The family fear that Shaker, who has shed half his 17-stone body weight since his imprisonment five and half years ago, is slowly dying. In one of his last, heavily censored, letters home Shaker, a Saudi Arabian passport holder who has been living in Britain since 1996, asks for the right to die.

He has recently joined a hunger strike in protest at his detention without trial and was being tube-fed.

Last month, the family thought he had died when it was reported that an anonymous Saudi national had been found dead at the US naval base in Cuba.

"We can find out very little about what is going on in Guantanamo Bay, so that when we hear these stories we always fear the worst," said Zin, who is being treated for depression.

She says it was Shaker's idea to leave their London home in the summer of 2001 because he felt frustrated at not having a proper home to bring up his family.

"The council couldn't find us a flat or house in London so we decided to leave. Shaker was always helping people in England and he wanted to help the children of Afghanistan, but wasn't sure whether he should be teaching or help build a hospital."

For a few weeks, the family shared a house with Moazzam Begg, a Briton who was freed from Guantanamo in 2005, who had also gone to Kabul to help children in Afghanistan. But when the American invasion started, the country became a very dangerous place to be.

"The bombs were falling every night and we had to leave the city to stay in a village. The children were terrified and kept telling us to be quiet in case our noise made the bombs come.

"Shaker was frightened too and I can remember his face now, it was almost as pale as the colour of the cream suit he was wearing. Shaker left the village to find a safer place for us. But in the middle of the night the villagers told us we had to go with a group travelling to the safety of Pakistan."

Zin recalled: "I was pregnant with our fourth child and we were all scared. In the end, I just went. I didn't see Shaker again. Sometimes I regret that decision. What if I stayed - would we all be together now?" Shaker was captured in December 2001 by the Americans, who claim he was fighting with the Taliban. Reprieve, the human rights group with is representing him, maintains that he was sold by villagers to the Northern Alliance who in turn sold him on to the Americans.

From there he was taken to Bagram airbase and later flown on to Guantanamo Bay. He has never seen his youngest son.

Today, Shaker's family will join the family of Moazzam Begg as well as MPs and human rights lawyers at a meeting in Balham, south London, organised by the charity Caged Prisoners, where they will call on the British and US governments for the immediate release of Shaker Aamer.

* The US Supreme Court has agreed to review whether detainees at Guantanamo Bay can use the civilian court system to challenge their indefinite confinement. The Bush administration argues that a new law strips courts of their jurisdiction to hear detainee cases. The justices, who rejected an identical request in April, took the action without making comment.