A former Guantanamo Bay detainee who suddenly vanished from Uruguay has been captured in Venezuela by authorities and shipped back to Uruguay where he belongs.
Jihad Ahmed Mustafa Dhiab, the Syrian detainee who sat in Gitmo for 12 years, arrived back in Uruguay early Tuesday, Reuters reports.
He had disappeared in June and managed to travel to Caracas in Venezuela via Brazil. Authorities vainly searched for him in Brazil.
“He did not properly enter either Brazil or Venezuela, and was deported to Uruguay. He will continue to be treated as a refugee,” Uruguayan Interior Minister Eduardo Bonomi said.
The reason he was captured was because he visited the Uruguay consulate in Brazil and tried to obtain authorization to leave to Turkey. As soon as he was in custody in Venezuela, Dhiab launched a hunger strike, much like the one he did in Gitmo. But when he realized that authorities in Venezuela and Uruguay simply didn’t care, he began to eat again on the plane ride back to Uruguay.
“He was even eating on the plane,” Uruguayan foreign minister Rodolfo Nin Novoa said, AFP reports. “He will surely get the all-clear [from doctors], because he does not have any medical issues.”
At the moment, Dhiab is being examined by doctors at a hospital in Montevideo.
Dhiab initially arrived in Uruguay in 2014, along with five other former detainees.
His disappearance prompted outrage from U.S. lawmakers, who urged the Obama administration not to ship out former detainees to countries who are not prepared to keep a close eye on them.
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