Lithuania paid a Guantánamo Bay detainee $113,000 for letting the CIA torture him in a black site there
- A man currently at Guantánamo Bay was previously held in a CIA black site in Lithuania.
- The European Court of Human Rights ruled in 2018 that Lithuania violated his rights by letting the CIA torture him.
Lithuania has paid a man currently held at Guantánamo Bay more than $100,000 for letting the CIA torture him in a black site in the country before he was brought to the detention camp.
The European Court of Human Rights ruled in 2018 that Lithuania had violated the European Convention on Human Rights by allowing the CIA to torture Abu Zubaydah in the country.
Lithuania has now paid him $113,00 in compensation, The Guardian reported. But the newspaper noted that Zubaydah can't actually access the money as he is still detained, and because the US Treasury has frozen his assets.
Zubaydah was captured by the US in 2002, as it believed him to be an al-Qaeda member. He was held in numerous CIA black sites around the world — where he has detailed brutal torture — and then brought to Guantánamo Bay in 2006.
Zubaydah has never been charged with any crimes, and investigators have since found that he was never a member of al-Qaeda and he had no advance knowledge of the 9/11 attacks.
He still remains detained indefinitely.
Zubaydah has drawn depictions of the ways he was tortured, as Insider's Eliza Relman previously reported.
They include images of him being waterboarded, being confined in boxes for days, kept from sleeping, and having his head banged against the wall. He also lost an eye while detained, for unknown reasons.
It is not clear how much of these kinds of torture, if any, were in Lithuania.
The Guardian noted that judges in Europe were previously told that Zubaydah was unlikely to have been subjected to the harshest forms of torture while in Lithuania, compared to the other sites where he was held, but that he still experienced what amounted to torture while he was held there.