Mauritania

Mauritania is the home country to which Mohamedou Ould Slahi tried to return in January 2000, and the place where the uncertainty of his later detention first took shape. It is presented not merely as a point on a transfer route but as the setting of an unresolved conflict: officials repeatedly acknowledged that evidence did not support accusations against him, yet the state ultimately surrendered him to foreign custody. The distance between his ordinary life in Nouakchott and his disappearance from his family gives Mauritania a central place in the account of his detention.

Homecoming and the First Detentions

After twelve years studying, living, and working overseas, mostly in Germany and briefly in Canada, Slahi set out for Mauritania in January 2000. His return was interrupted by two detentions, first by police outside the country and then by Mauritanian authorities. Federal Bureau of Investigation agents questioned him about the Millennium Plot, an alleged plan to bomb Los Angeles International Airport. The authorities concluded that there was no basis to believe he had participated, and he was released on February 19, 2000.

Between that first detention and his next arrest, Slahi resumed a relatively ordinary working life in Nouakchott. He did computer and electronics work for a medical-supply company that also provided Internet services, followed by work for a family-owned import business. His employer initially faced uncertainty because Slahi had been publicly treated as a terrorism suspect. According to the account, the head of Mauritanian intelligence personally reassured the employer that Slahi was cleared to return, and his boss took him back. The episode shows how an official assurance of innocence could restore his employment without ending the security authorities’ attention to him.

In the period before his final detention, Slahi’s work brought him to the Presidential Palace of Mauritania. He spent a day preparing a bid to upgrade the telephone and computer systems of President Maaouya Ould Sid’Ahmed Taya. When he returned home, police appeared again and asked him to come in for questioning. The contrast was stark: after completing a professional assignment for the presidency, he was once more summoned by the state’s security apparatus.

Released, but Still Under Suspicion

On September 29, 2001, Mauritanian authorities detained Slahi for two weeks and questioned him again about the Millennium Plot, with Federal Bureau of Investigation agents involved. They released him once more, and the government publicly affirmed his innocence. The repeated sequence—detention, questioning, official exoneration, and release—did not resolve his status. Instead, the public declaration of innocence stood alongside continuing pressure from the United States and a new period in which Slahi says he was kept under house arrest without a stated basis.

Slahi describes a difference between the public assurances and the practical limits placed on his freedom. His employer had been told that he was cleared, and he found work after his release, but he understood that the United States wanted the Mauritanian government to keep him confined at home. He also says that his family urged him to answer police requests because local authorities had assured them he had done nothing wrong. In his account, trust in those assurances helped shape his decision to comply when the police returned.

On November 20, 2001, officers asked Slahi to accompany them for further questioning. He did not flee or resist: he asked them to wait while he showered, took his keys, drove his own car to police headquarters, and told his mother he expected to return soon. That ordinary, voluntary departure became the threshold to his disappearance. The scene is consequential precisely because it begins without a dramatic escape or an announced arrest; the people around him had reason to believe this was another temporary interview.

The November Transfer and Its Concealment

Slahi spent seven days in Mauritanian custody. During that time his family was not allowed to visit and, as he later learned, was not told where he was being held. On November 28, Mauritanian Independence Day, he was informed that he would be sent to Jordan. A Central Intelligence Agency rendition flight carried him to a prison in Amman, where Jordanian intelligence services interrogated him for seven and a half months. The national territory from which he had expected to go home thus became the first stage in a transfer beyond his family’s reach.

The date sharpened the political meaning of the handover. Mauritania’s independence commemorated the country’s separation from French colonial rule in 1960; Slahi emphasizes the irony that, on its anniversary in 2001, the republic transferred one of its own citizens to foreign custody. He argues that the handover violated the Mauritanian constitution’s prohibition on extraditing Mauritanian citizens, as well as customary international law and treaties. His point is not simply that the transfer was unjust, but that it exposed a limit on the country’s ability or willingness to exercise sovereignty over a matter involving its own citizen.

The preceding evening, prison guards let Slahi watch a parade moving from downtown toward the Presidential Palace, with bands and schoolboys carrying lighted candles. The procession recalled his participation as a schoolboy nineteen years earlier. In the account, this remembered public ceremony of national beginnings sits beside the approaching secret transfer: the same country that had once been a source of childhood belonging was now, in his view, failing to decide his fate through its own laws. The juxtaposition makes the holiday more than a date in a chronology; it becomes a measure of the gap between formal independence and control over a citizen’s custody.

Family, Disappearance, and the Meaning of Place

For nearly a year, Slahi’s family believed he remained in a Mauritanian security prison. His oldest brother, Hamoud, regularly brought clean clothes and money for his meals, while Slahi was actually being held abroad. Prison officials accepted the money and did not disclose that he had been transferred. The family’s belief was therefore sustained not only by a lack of information but by a false local appearance of continued custody.

The concealment ended for the family when Slahi’s youngest brother, Yahdih, read a report in Der Spiegel on October 28, 2002, saying that Slahi had spent months in a United States prison camp at Guantánamo. Yahdih had taken over Slahi’s role as the family’s European breadwinner. He was furious at the local authorities who had repeatedly assured the family that Slahi was safe and in their custody. The discovery revealed the practical consequences of the secret transfer in Mauritania: relatives continued to care for a prisoner who was no longer there, while officials allowed them to believe otherwise.

Slahi does not direct all his criticism outward. He says he blames his own government more than the United States because Mauritanian authorities, rather than foreign agents, had taken him from his home and handed him over without presenting evidence. In his analysis, Mauritania should have required proof, pursued any case under its own criminal law, and protected its constitutional restrictions on extradition. The account’s return to Mauritania is therefore double-edged: it remains the place of Slahi’s mother, family, work, and homecoming, but also the jurisdiction whose officials made his removal possible.