U.S. military prosecutors swore out war crimes charges against a trio of Guantánamo Bay detainees alleging the men were part of an al Qaeda bomb-making squad.
Among those charged was Ghassan Abdullah al Sharbi, 33, a Saudi Arabian citizen who got an electrical engineering degree from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Prescott, Arizona.
All three were charged, separately, with conspiracy and providing material support for terrorism. Conviction could carry a maximum sentence of life imprisonment.
Prosecutors propose to try the men individually before separate juries of military offices and not as alleged co-conspirators with one judge and one jury, said Navy Cmdr. Jeffrey Gordon, a Pentagon spokesman.
All three men were captured in March 2002 in the Pakistani city of Faisalabad, according to Pentagon documents, in the same raid that caught the alleged arch-terrorist known as Abu Zubaydah.
The CIA dispatched Abu Zubaydah to secret overseas U.S. detention and subjected him to a special interrogation program to break him, including waterboarding him -- while the so-called 'Faisalabad Three' were sent to Guantánamo for detention, interrogation and eventual trial.
The other two charged Thursday were:
• Jabran bin al Qahtani, about 29, like Sharbi also a Saudi, who had steadfastly rejected his military appointed attorney in earlier Pentagon efforts to assign him a defense counsel;
• Sufyian Barhoumi, 34, an Algerian, accused of being the trio's explosives instructor. He had appeared at an earlier, aborted effort to stage war crimes trials with a portion of his hand missing, reportedly blown off in a bomb-handling training accident.
The Pentagon prosecutor swore out the charges on Thursday, meaning they must be reviewed by a Pentagon appointee responsible for military commissions, Susan Crawford, who must decide whether to go forward and eventual trials at the U.S. Navy base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
