FORMER Guantanamo Bay prisoner Jamal Kiyemba, also known as Tonny Kiyemba, is set to stand trial on terrorism financing charges, according to the International Crimes Division (ICD) of the High Court in Kampala, Uganda. Kiyemba was arrested last year and charged with belonging to a terrorist organisation under the Anti-Terrorism Act of 2002. He was later committed to the ICD for trial.
During a pretrial session at the ICD, Justice Alice Komuhangi confirmed charges against Kiyemba of belonging to the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), a rebel group operating in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), and soliciting financial support for the ADF. The prosecution presented evidence that Kiyemba had been a radical since 1999 and had expressed admiration for and support of terrorist organisations including Al Qaeda, Al-Shabaab, and the ADF.
The court heard that Kiyemba had recruited individuals for the ADF in Uganda and the DRC between 2021 and January 2022. The judge ruled that the prosecution had presented incriminating evidence sufficient to warrant Kiyemba standing trial. He is expected to appear before a panel of three justices or a judge appointed by the head of the division to take a plea before the trial commences. Kiyemba has been remanded in prison as he awaits the fixing of a date for the hearing of the case.
Kiyemba’s defence lawyer, Geoffrey Turyamusiima, argued that Kiyemba had made a charge and caution statement while mentally ill and that the police did not subject him to a medical examination before extracting the statement. Turyamusiima also noted that Kiyemba had been granted indefinite leave to remain in the UK, where his mother, four brothers, and sister live. Kiyemba, a former pharmacy student at a university in Leicester, travelled to Pakistan in 2002, where he was arrested for alleged links to Al Qaeda and was later held at Guantanamo Bay for four years until he was released in 2006 without charge and later received £1 million ($1.5 million) in compensation for wrongful imprisonment and abuse of his human rights.
Kiyemba was returned to Uganda and imprisoned after former British Home Secretary Charles Clarke intervened to keep him out of Britain on ‘national security grounds.’ He claimed that the Americans forced him, under torture, to confess to terrorist activities and that the UK’s domestic counterintelligence agency, MI5, interrogated him repeatedly, questioning him about British terror suspects and the jailed clerics Abu Hamza and Abu Qatada.
‘My doctor, my local mosque, my education, employment, friends, taxes, home and above all else my family, it is all in Britain,’ Kiyemba said while in Guantanamo.
