Freed BBC Reporter Writes to Guantanamo Detainee

4 October 2007

NEW YORK (Reuters) -A BBC reporter kidnapped and held for months in the Gaza Strip has written to an Al Jazeera television cameraman detained at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to express his support, a journalism watchdog said on Thursday.

In a letter to Guantanamo detainee Sami al-Hajj, a copy of which was released by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) in New York, Alan Johnston thanked al-Hajj for his appeal to the Gaza kidnappers to release him earlier this year.

Johnston disappeared on March 12 while driving his car in the Gaza Strip and was held for nearly four months. Al-Hajj made a public appeal to the Gaza kidnappers in March, saying: "While the United States has kidnapped me and held me for years on end, this is not a lesson that Muslims should copy."

Al-Hajj has been held at the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo for more than five years on suspicion of having links to Islamic militant groups. He has been accused of making videos of Osama bin Laden though U.S. authorities have not brought any official charges.

"In the light of my own experience of incarceration I am aware of how hard it must be for you and your family to endure your detention, and I very much hope that your case might be resolved soon," Johnston wrote in the letter.

"I understand that after some five years in Guantanamo you are calling to be allowed to answer any allegations that are being made against you. And of course I would always support any prisoner's right to a fair trial."

The CPJ said al-Hajj's lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, had called the accusations baseless and reported that U.S. interrogators focused almost exclusively on obtaining intelligence on Qatar-based Al Jazeera and its staff.

It quoted his lawyer as saying al-Haj had staged a hunger strike and was in declining physical and mental health, having lost nearly 40 pounds (18 kg).

There are about 340 detainees at Guantanamo. The first prisoners arrived nearly six years ago after the United States began what U.S. President George W. Bush called a war on terrorism in response to the September 11 attacks by bin Laden's al Qaeda network in 2001.