BY PETER STARCK
Reuters
STOCKHOLM - The father of a Swede held by the United States at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, built himself a metal cage in a central Stockholm square
Wednesday and began a hunger strike to demand the release of his son.
"I will live here, day and night, and be on hunger strike," Mehdi Ghezali, 57, told reporters while erecting a 2.5- by 2.5-yard cage.
"I demand that my son be allowed to return to Sweden," read one of many posters Ghezali put up beside the cage, intended to resemble those in which
prisoners at the U.S. Naval base are held. He said he plans to stay there until September 14.
Mehdi-Muhammed Ghezali, 23, is one of about 600 prisoners held by the United States at Guantanamo Bay on suspicion of involvement with Osama bin
Laden's al Qaeda network. Washington believes bin Laden masterminded the September 11 attacks.
Mehdi Ghezali, a Swedish citizen, said his son had traveled to Pakistan in June 2001 to study Islam. Sweden's Sapo security police have said his son had
nothing to do with terrorism or al Qaeda, Ghezali said.
Ghezali said the conditions for prisoners at the U.S. base are appalling. "They are treated like dogs. They sit in cages like monkeys. They have no toilets,
only buckets. It's torture," he said.
Stockholm has repeatedly urged U.S. authorities to clarify the fate of the Swede but has not yet received a satisfactory answer, officials say.
The United States has said the detainees, some there since January, are not prisoners of war under the Geneva conventions, a stance criticized by human
rights groups.
Ghezali's protest began at a sensitive time, less than a week after a 29-year-old Swede of Tunisian origin was detained as he was about to board a
London-bound flight with a loaded gun in his hand luggage.
That incident, just two weeks before the first anniversary of the September 11 suicide hijacking attacks on New York and Washington, has sparked concern
among politicians that support for anti-immigrant far-right parties might increase in the run-up to Sweden's September 15 election.
One million of Sweden's nine million people are immigrants, almost half of them Muslims.