In the early hours of 2 October 2001, Mamdouh Habib and two young German men were taken off a bus travelling between Quetta and Karachi by Pakistani security officers. It was shortly after 9/11, and only days before the Americans attacked Afghanistan. The Pakistanis, at the behest of the Americans, were rounding up anyone who in any way looked suspicious, interrogating them and passing them onto the Americans. The unlucky ones were then 'rendered' to a third-party country to be further interrogated and tortured, where they either disappeared for good or were sent to Guantanamo Bay, branded as terrorists with no legal rights.
This is what happened to Mamdouh Habib. It took nearly three-and-a-half years before he was eventually released without charge from Guantanamo and reunited with his wife and four children in Australia. The original American draft charges had accused him of attending al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan, and of training the 9-11 terrorists in martial arts. They even suggested he was meant to have been on one of the 9-11 hijacked planes.
The true story of the kidnapping and incarceration of Mamdouh Habib first in Egypt then in Guantanamo is told here by him for the first time. The complicity of the Australian government in his abduction to Egypt is revealed, and its subsequent neglect of him while in Guantanamo. His relationship with other well-known alleged terrorists, including meeting David Hicks both in Afghanistan and in Guantanamo, also comes to light.
My Story is also the account of a young Egyptian man who migrated to Australia in 1982 in order to settle down and to make a good life for himself. It is about his marriage to Maha, a remarkable young woman originally from Lebanon, who was to become his steadfast companion, and who throughout the years of ordeal tirelessly fought for the release of her husband and the restitution of his name.
