Morocco

Morocco enters Guantánamo Diary through the detention history of Ramzi bin al-Shibh, not as a documented stop in Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s own journey. A prison near Rabat held bin al-Shibh during the fall after his capture and transfer into CIA custody; accounts he gave during interrogations helped bring Slahi’s earlier contact with him into the case against Slahi.

Morocco in the Detention Route

After bin al-Shibh was captured in a shoot-out in a suburb of Karachi, he was transferred immediately to CIA custody. He was held first at the CIA’s Dark Prison in Afghanistan and then, through the fall, at a prison near Rabat, Morocco. The account identifies the prison’s location but does not describe its conditions or specify which facility was the setting for each interrogation.

Connection to Slahi’s Case

During interrogations at one of those facilities, bin al-Shibh recounted a chance meeting on a train in Germany with two friends. They had discussed jihad and traveling to Chechnya; the stranger advised them to contact Slahi in Duisburg, and Slahi hosted them for a night. Bin al-Shibh’s account thus linked Slahi to the men through an earlier encounter and a discussion of travel and training. It did not, as the book emphasizes, establish that Slahi directed them to join a plot against the United States.

Limits of the Place’s Significance

Morocco’s significance here is specific: it is part of the CIA detention sequence through which an account connecting bin al-Shibh and Slahi emerged. The book does not place Slahi himself in Morocco, nor does it identify the Rabat-area prison as the site where bin al-Shibh made the statements about Slahi. Keeping that distinction matters: Morocco marks one setting in the wider chain of secret custody, while the allegations reaching Slahi arose from testimony gathered across an incompletely specified sequence of facilities.