Afghanistan demands return of Guantanamo boy

Afghanistan has demanded that the United States return a young Afghan detained throughout his teenage years in Guantanamo Bay, where lawyers said Monday he was tortured at the controversial prison. The Afghan government sent a letter to the US embassy in Kabul demanding the repatriation of Mohammad Jawad, arrested in 2002 when he was 12 years old, a senior government lawyer told AFP. "We expect the US government to return Jawad without any delay," Sayed Sharif Sharif told AFP. The detention of Jawad, now aged around 19, was "totally illegal", he added. Afghan police arrested him in Kabul in December 2002 after a grenade attack wounded two US soldiers. He was later handed over to the US military which took him to its prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. His US government-assigned lawyers, who are in Kabul to push the Afghan authorities to demand his release, say he is innocent. The boy was abused during his detention, one of the military defence lawyers, Major Eric Montalvo, told a press conference in Kabul. "There is no dispute that Jawad was tortured in the hands of the US government over the last seven years," he said, adding such facts had been established in US courts. Jawad's uncle, Gul Nak, told reporters his family only learned he was in Guantanamo 10 months after he was taken to Cuba when they received a letter from him through the International Committee of the Red Cross. "He was a child, he had nothing to do with the Taliban or terrorists," Nak said. Instead the boy, whose father died fighting the Soviet invasion in the 1980s, worked as well digger, he said. "We want them (the US government) to compensate us financially as well as apologise," Nak said. The chief of Afghanistan's Bar Association, Rohullah Qarizada, told reporters that Jawad suffered "extremely inhuman violence, abuse and torture during interrogation in Guantanamo." This included sleep deprivation, beating and death threats, he said. "They would make him hold a bottle in his hand, telling him that it was a grenade which would explode if he dropped it," Qarizada said. "They also sprayed pepper into his eyes," he said, citing information provided by the US lawyers. Jawad tried several times to commit suicide by smashing his head on the walls of his cell and regularly cried for his mother in the first years of his detention, he said. State prosecutors also wanted the interior minister at the time, Taj Mohammad Wardak, held to account for allowing the US military to take the boy who was also tortured by the Afghan authorities, Qarizada said. Jawad is believed to be the youngest of those Afghans -- rounded up in the US-led "war on terror" that started with the 2001 invasion to topple the Taliban government and sent to the controversial prison.