Meet Prisoner 552: Fayez al-Kandari
The 34 year-old Kuwaiti has been a prisoner at Guantanamo Bay detention camp for 11 years. After the September 11th terrorist attacks, the United States government accused al-Kandari of being an advisor to Osama bin Laden and arrested him in Afghanistan in December 2001. He was flown to Cuba in May 2002, where it took six years for the American government to charge him with giving "material support to terrorism." These charges were dropped in June 2012, but al-Kandari remains incarcerated, as the United States considers him to be too dangerous to release. He is one of 167 prisoners being held in the camp. Al-Kandari has maintained his innocence from the very beginning, insisting that he never met or aided Osama bin Laden and that he was in Afghanistan for charity work. He agreed to speak to Agence France-Presse via emails passed through his military lawyer, Colonel Barry Wingard, in the first interview of its kind at the prison camp.
The Detainee of Eleven Years In His Own Words:
