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Gold9472
04-14-2009, 01:23 PM
Spain asks U.S. about location of 9/11 suspect

http://www.miamiherald.com/news/world/story/998941.html

BY DANIEL WOOLLS
Associated Press

MADRID -- A Spanish judge has asked the United States, Britain and three other countries about the whereabouts of an alleged senior al Qaeda member who was captured in Pakistan in 2005, a court official said Tuesday.

Judge Baltasar Garzon of the National Court wants to find Mustafa Setmarian Nasar, a Syrian-born Spaniard who was indicted on terrorism charges in Spain in 2003, said the official, who spoke anonymously in keeping with court rules.

Setmarian Nasar is considered a jihadist ideologue and writer.

U.S. officials have confirmed he was seized in the southwestern Pakistani city of Quetta in November 2005, and Pakistani officials said he was flown out of the country.

Human Rights Watch and other rights groups have said they believe he has been held in secret CIA prisons.

Garzon last week sent queries about Setmarian Nasar to Interpol offices in the U.S., Britain, Pakistan, Syria and Afghanistan.

Garzon indicted Setmarian Nasar in September 2003 on charges of belonging to a Spain-based al Qaeda cell that was accused of helping to plan the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks in the United States.

The Spanish court official said he did not know exactly why Garzon was reopening the case and trying to find Setmarian Nasar.

He declined to comment on a report in the newspaper El Pais that it is because the United States has announced it is closing Guantánamo and other prisons used to hold terrorism suspects.

Setmarian Nasar's name is not among the 16 former CIA-held detainees who were sent to Guantánamo in 2006. Fourteen of those men arrived en mass in September 2006.