Slahi's 2000 transfer from Senegal to Mauritania was an early turning point in his return home: a journey routed through official channels that he experienced as a controlled handover, not an ordinary border crossing. Senegalese authorities transferred him to Mauritanian custody, where questioning continued. The episode established a pattern that would recur in his detention: authorities could move him across jurisdictions, while information about his whereabouts and treatment remained contested.

Return and Detention in Senegal

After twelve years studying, living, and working abroad, mainly in Germany and briefly in Canada, Slahi set out for Mauritania in January 2000. His trip began with a flight from Montreal through Brussels to Dakar, where his brothers met him to accompany him home. Instead, Senegalese police detained him and questioned him about the Millennium Plot, the alleged plan to bomb Los Angeles International Airport. An American came to take photographs, and Slahi was subsequently questioned by Mauritanian authorities as well.

The account places the transfer within an investigation that did not establish his involvement in the alleged plot. The timeline records that he was released on February 19, after authorities concluded that there was no basis to believe he had taken part. Thus the move to Mauritania was not a return to an unrestricted private life: it carried the investigation across a border and continued the questioning there.

The Airport Handover

The transfer was arranged through Senegalese and Mauritanian officials. A Mitsubishi SUV took Slahi and the officials accompanying him from the police station to the airport, a drive of about twenty-five minutes. At the terminal, the group used the diplomatic passage rather than ordinary civilian procedures. Slahi described the airport as prepared for their arrival: officials displayed badges and moved the group through without the usual formalities. The route offered speed and privileged access, but to him it also made the unequal exercise of authority visible.

In an empty waiting room, a Senegalese official took Slahi’s passport away and returned it stamped. Slahi expected to board the regular Air Afrique flight to Nouakchott. Instead, the group went to the runway, where a small white plane was already running. The pilot told the inspector that the flight covered roughly 300 miles and would take between forty-five minutes and an hour, depending on the wind. The plane was so small that its passengers had to fit tightly inside; it was plainly overloaded. The difference between the scheduled civilian flight he expected and the private aircraft prepared for the transfer made the journey’s exceptional arrangements unmistakable.

The flight delivered him to Mauritania, where a Mauritanian inspector and another official met the group near the airport’s rear entrance. Slahi hoped that an airport police chief he knew might appear and speak favorably on his behalf, but the chief did not arrive. The handover therefore ended not with an independent advocate or a return to family, but with Mauritanian officials taking charge. They said he would be escorted to a hotel for the rest of the night; further questioning followed under Mauritanian authority.

Disclosure and Its Limits

The transfer nevertheless produced a brief opening in the information blackout. Slahi asked the Senegalese inspector to inform his family that he was in Mauritania. The inspector made the call, and Senegalese officials issued a public statement saying that they had handed Slahi over to his own country. That disclosure mattered: his family was told where he had been taken, and the transfer was publicly acknowledged rather than concealed at that stage. The account also notes that Mauritanian and United States officials were displeased by the announcement.

The disclosure did not give Slahi control over what happened next. In Mauritania, officials questioned him about the call, and he understood that the telephone conversation had been intercepted. On February 12, after his first meal since leaving Senegal, he was still being questioned. He was released on February 19, but the interrogation and official scrutiny had continued across the handover. Public confirmation of a transfer, in other words, did not itself end detention or secure lasting protection.

From Homecoming to a Wider Detention Route

After his release, Slahi lived with his family and worked as an electrical engineer in Nouakchott. Mauritanian authorities detained him again on September 29, 2001, questioned him with Federal Bureau of Investigation agents about the Millennium Plot, and released him; the government publicly affirmed his innocence. When police returned to his home on November 20 for further questioning, he went voluntarily, driving his own car to the station. This time, the journey did not lead back to his family. A CIA rendition plane carried him to a prison in Amman, where he was held and interrogated for seven and a half months.

The first Senegal-to-Mauritania transfer and the later secret removal to Jordan were distinct events, but together they show how Slahi’s return became a sequence of custody handovers. His family initially knew of the 2000 transfer and the Mauritanian questioning; in the later disappearance, they were led to believe for months that he remained in a local prison. From Mauritania, his detention would extend through Jordan, Bagram, and Guantánamo. Slahi described the larger route as an endless tour of detention and interrogation, covering twenty thousand miles over eighteen months and passing through four countries. The 2000 handover is significant within that trajectory not because it was already the later secret rendition, but because it made the border crossing itself part of the machinery of detention.