Published 30 July 2008, doi:10.1136/bmj.a1071
Cite this as: BMJ 2008;337:a1071

News

Doctors protest against surgeon held for six years at Guantanamo

Lynn Eaton

1 London

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

More than 100 doctors have signed a petition to protest against the continued detention of an orthopaedic surgeon at Guantanamo Bay.

Ayman Saeed Batarfi, a 37 year old from Yemen, has been held for six years at the US prison base. His only crime, say the protestors, "was to treat civilian casualties in a war zone."

The petition states that after his postgraduate studies in Pakistan and inspired by the Afghan trauma patients he had helped Dr Batarfi decided to work for a non-governmental organisation to renovate a hospital in Kabul in spring 2001.

"With the chaos after the onset of the Afghan conflict in late 2001, he was ‘sold’ to the US military by the Northern Alliance," it states.

Dr Batarfi was detained and is held in Guantanamo, but he has never been charged with a crime; he has never had a trial; and, according to the petitioners, there . . . [Full text of this article]


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