Spain's top court on Monday overturned a six-year prison sentence handed down last year to a former Spanish Guantanamo detainee for belonging to a terrorist organisation. The Madrid court said there was a "total absence of tangible proof" against Hamed Abderrahmane, who has been nicknamed the "Spanish Taleban".
It said his right to be presumed innocent until found guilty had been violated.
The supreme court also ruled that all investigations carried out during his two-year detention at the US Guantanamo base on Cuba before he was handed over to Spain should be declared "totally null and therefore non-existant."
Abderrahmane has denied belonging to the al Qaeda network and described himself as a "martyr". On sentencing Abderrahmane in October 2005, Spanish judges said he had joined al Qaeda "in full knowledge of the terrorist profile of the group." Abderrahmane, who hails from the Spanish enclave of Ceuta in north Africa, was arrested in Pakistan in October 2001 while trying to flee the country following the September 11 attacks on the United States.
Two months later he was handed over to US authorities in Afghanistan and held at Kandahar prior to his transfer to the notorious prison at Guantanamo in February 2002. "I will never be able to go into what happened," he told the court during the trial, referring to his time at Guantanamo which "destroyed my life psychologically and physically."
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