Majid Khan

Majid Shoukat Khan (born February 28, 1980) is a Pakistani who was the only known legal resident of the United States held in the Guantanamo Bay Detainment Camp.

He was a "high value detainee" subject to “enhanced interrogation” by the U.S. intelligence forces.

Khan originally came to the United States in 1998, where he gained asylum.

He lived in a suburb of Baltimore, Maryland where he attended high school and became radicalized.

He returned to his native Pakistan after the 9/11 attacks to join Al Qaeda and worked for them as a courier, according to the BBC, The Progressive, and the New York Times.

He was granted asylum in the U.S. in 1998, and graduated the following year.

According to officials, these family members introduced Khan to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), the man accused of orchestrating the September 11, 2001 attacks.

Allegedly Mohammed later enlisted Khan in helping to support and plan terrorist attacks against the U.S. and Israel.

Government officials assert that Khan, under KSM's tutelage, was being trained to blow up gas stations and poison water reservoirs, and that he plotted to assassinate Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf.

In 2002, Khan returned to Pakistan, where he married 18-year-old Rabia Yaqoub.

According to Deborah Scroggins, author of Wanted Women, Khan had become more religious, after his mother's death, and had asked his aunt to help him find a wife who was also a religious scholar.

Rabia was one of his aunt's students.

According to the New York Times, it was then he became a courier for Al Qaeda.

He returned to the United States for a short period to continue his work as a database administrator in a Maryland government office.

He claims that he helped the FBI investigate and arrest an illegal immigrant from Pakistan during this time.

On December 25, 2002, Aafia Siddiqui made a trip from Pakistan to the U.S., saying that she was looking for a job.

Pakistani authorities captured him in 2003 and handed over to the CIA who held him incognito in a black site in Afghanistan, interrogating him and subjecting him to “the most horrific torture.” In 2006 he was sent to Guantanamo, where in 2012 he pleaded guilty to conspiracy and the murder of 11 innocent civilians in the 2003 Marriott Hotel bombing in Jakarta, Indonesia, and also for the attempted assassination of Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf.

He also began cooperating with the U.S. government.

In 2021 he was sentenced by Guantanamo Military Commission retroactively to 26 years in prison.

His sentence was completed on March 1, 2022, and after Belize agreed to accept him he was released from Guantanamo Bay to that country on February 2, 2023.

Khan's family settled in Catonsville, Maryland, near Baltimore, where he attended Owings Mills High School and was "exposed to radical Islam".

She left the U.S. on January 2, 2003.

The FBI suspects that the real purpose of her trip was to open a P.O. box for Khan.

Siddiqui registered Khan as co-owner of the box, claiming he was her husband.

Khan returned to Pakistan on March 5, 2003.

He, his brother Mohammed, and other relatives were arrested at their residence in Karachi by Pakistani security agents and taken into custody.

Khan and his family were taken to an unknown location.

After about a month, the entire family, with the exception of Khan, was released.

Rabia Khan and the rest of his family heard nothing of his whereabouts for three years.

Then, in September 2006, President George W. Bush announced that Khan, along with 13 other so-called "high value detainees", had been transferred from secret CIA prisons to military custody at Guantánamo Bay detention camp to await prosecution under the new military tribunal system authorized by the Military Commissions Act of 2006.

Khan was the first of the fourteen high-value detainees to challenge his detention in court.

The Center for Constitutional Rights filed the habeas corpus challenge on October 5, 2006 — before President Bush signed the Military Commissions Act of 2006 into law.

But, the Military Commissions Act of 2006 restricted detainees from mounting challenges through U.S. courts and was retroactive.

The Center for Constitutional Rights and others argued against this act before the U.S. Supreme Court in Boumediene v. Bush on December 5, 2007.

Justice Kennedy held in the case that the MCA could not deny detainees and other petitioners, including Khan, their right to petition United States courts for writ of habeas corpus.

In the government's account, Khan was exposed to a radicalized element of Islam while in the United States.

Khan allegedly began attending secret prayer meetings at Baltimore's Islamic Society, where he was recruited by individuals who sought out disaffected young people.

U.S. officials assert that Khan's first trip to Pakistan connected him to family members affiliated with Al-Qaeda.

The key to the box was later found held by Uzair Paracha, who was convicted of providing material support to al-Qaeda and was sentenced to 30 years in federal prison in 2006; fifteen years after his arrest, Uzair's conviction was deemed void on July 3, 2018, by Judge Sidney H. Stein, based on newly discovered statements made by Ammar al-Baluchi, Majid Khan (detainee) and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, bringing his involvement and intentions into question.

Siddiqui's ex-husband said he was suspicious of Siddiqui's intentions, as she made her trip at a time when U.S. universities are closed.