Filmmaker pleads for captive's release

An American filmmaker who was imprisoned for nearly two months in Iraq by the US military before being cleared and freed is trying to secure the release of an Iraqi man he met in captivity.

The Los Angeles-based filmmaker, Cyrus Kar, said Numan Adnan Al Kaby is a legal US resident who returned to Iraq after American troops drove Saddam Hussein from power.

Kar said the US military continues to hold Al Kaby even though authorities concluded on July 4 that he had nothing to do with an April attack on a US base in Iraq.

Kar and Al Kaby’s cousin, Haider Al Saedy, who lives in the US, said they plan to file a federal lawsuit today seeking Al Kaby’s release.

“I understand our soldiers need to take all precautions in a war zone, but once a person is found innocent,” the US government needs “to do what is right,” Kar told the Los Angeles Times.

Kar, who went to Iraq to make a documentary on the ancient Persian ruler Cyrus the Great, was taken into custody in mid-May after military authorities found timers that could be used in bombs in a taxi in which Kar and his cameraman were riding. The FBI cleared him in mid-June but he remained imprisoned until July 10.

Al Kaby, 38, lived in a refugee camp in Saudi Arabia after the 1991 Gulf War and came to the US in 1994 on a refugee visa, said Al Saedy, who spent time with Al Kaby in the camp.

Al Kaby won political asylum but decided to return to Iraq in 2004 to see his parents, brothers and sisters, who remained there.

“He thought since Saddam was gone, it would finally be safe for him to go,” Al Saedy said.

But he was arrested in April by US Marines after calling in sick to work on the day that mortars were fired at the base where he worked for an American company that’s helping rebuild Iraq.

Kar said he and Al Kaby lived in adjoining cells at a prison camp on the outskirts of Baghdad.

He said he witnessed military officials tell Al Kaby that he had been cleared of any wrongdoing, and also read a letter to that effect.

Mark Rosenbaum, the legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, plans to file a lawsuit today arguing that Al Kaby’s detention violates the US Constitution, the Geneva Convention and international law.

“The government is turning justice on its head by keeping an innocent man in jail,” said Rosenbaum, who also filed a lawsuit on Kar’s behalf when he was imprisoned.

A spokesman for the US military in Iraq said he could provide no information on Al Kaby.