WASHINGTON, December 18 (RIA Novosti) – The US administration is considering using a military commission in the United States to try a Russian captured while fighting alongside Islamic radicals in Afghanistan, where he is currently being held in a US detention facility, The Washington Post has reported.
The detainee, known by the nom de guerre Irek Hamidullan, served in the Soviet army during its war in Afghanistan in the 1980s but later deserted and took up arms with the Taliban to fight US forces following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the Post reported on its website Wednesday evening.
Hamidullan, believed to be in his late 50s, is suspected of involvement in attacks in 2009 that left US troops either wounded or dead, the newspaper cited US officials as saying. He was captured last year after being wounded during a battle near the Afghan border, the report cited the officials as saying.
He is currently being held at the Parwan Detention Facility near the Bagram air base in Afghanistan, according to the Post.
A court in Russia’s mainly Muslim republic of Tatarstan last year ruled that audio lectures delivered by a man named Irek Hamidullin and distributed on compact discs were extremist in nature and aimed at recruiting jihadists.
It was not immediately clear if the man named in the Tatarstan court ruling is the same as the man currently being held by US forces in Afghanistan.
Russian prosecutors identified Hamidullin as an “ideologist” of the banned radical Islamist sect Takfir wal-Hijra, which is believed to have emerged in Egypt sometime in the 1970s or 1980s and is active in numerous Middle Eastern states, including Syria and Lebanon.
Russian police said last month that they detained 14 alleged members of Takfir wal-Hijra in eastern Moscow during a special operation by police and security service forces.
According to 2004 report by the Russian daily newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets, a man named Irek Hamidullin, a native of the city of Naberezhnye Chelny in Tatarstan, was part of a group of 17 Muslim fighters who moved to Afghanistan in 1999 to battle people they considered infidels.
Hamidullin was detained and questioned by Russian security forces in April 2004 after being captured and deported by Pakistani security forces for illegally crossing into the country from Afghanistan, according to Moskovsky Komsomolets, which published purported excerpts from his interrogation by the Russians.
Russian authorities did not have sufficient grounds to detain him, and he was planning to move with his family to Sudan, Moskovsky Komsomolets reported at the time.
It was not immediately clear whether the man in the Moskovsky Komsomolets report was the same man currently in US custody or named in the Tatarstan court decision last year.
The man described in the Moskovsky Komsomolets report, however, was quoted as saying that he traveled to Chechnya in the late 1990s to live under sharia law but that he became disillusioned after seeing that people freely used alcohol and tobacco there.
The Washington Post reported Wednesday that Hamidullan, the Russian detainee in Afghanistan, is believed to have ties to one or several insurgent groups and links to Chechnya, a restive republic in southern Russia that has seen two bloody wars between Muslim separatists and Russian federal forces over the past two decades.
“He’s pretty well-connected in the terrorist world,” the newspaper cited an official with firsthand knowledge of the case as saying.
US officials said that they have discussed Hamidullan’s case with their Russian counterparts but that Moscow does not appear to be interested in having him returned to Russia, the Post reported.
Hamidullan has sworn to take up arms again if he is released from custody and could be tried at a US military facility like the the Naval Brig in Charleston, South Carolina, according to the Post.
