Mauritania Qaeda detainees demand marital privacy

A group of al-Qaeda detainees in Mauritania called for their right to marital privacy and asked the prison administration to schedule days for their wives to visit them on regular basis.

With their jail time ranging from 15 years to life sentence, several al-Qaeda detainees told members of rights groups who have visited them lately that they demand meeting their wives in private since this is their only chance to have children as well as establish a normal marital relationship.

The right to marital privacy has been granted to few inmates of Mauritanian prisons on irregular basis. Several of those got married during their jail term.

Death row prisoner Maarouf Ould al-Heiba, charged with killing French tourists and taking part in clashes with security forces, was allowed to meet his wife in private at the central prison facility in the Mauritanian capital Nouakchott where he is detained.

Heiba, who was sentenced to death for murder, possession of weapons, and belonging to a terrorist group, got a boy and celebrated with his fellow prisoners.

Other prisoners are waiting for the prison administration to allow them to meet their wives. One of them is Sidi Ould Sidna, also accused of killing French tourists and engaging in clashes with government forces, who got married between two death sentences issued against him for terrorist activities.

Escape from prison

Mauritanian officials usually eye private visits with suspicion on the grounds that unmonitored meetings between prisoners and their wives might result in delivering secret messages or communication devices.

According to prison officials, several prisoners managed to escape wearing women’s loose dresses and veils.

In 2007, three of the most dangerous Jihadist prisoners, head of Mauritania’s al-Qaeda al-Khadeem Ould al-Saman, Sidi Ould Habat, and Hamada Ould Mohamed Khiro, escaped from Nouakchott’s central prison after being granted the right to meet their wives in private.

Authorities assume that their wives provided them with women’s clothes and that the prisoners took advantage of the crowds that fill the prison on visiting days to get out among the other women. Since then, prison authorities stopped private visits.

Putting pressure on prisoners

According to observers and rights groups, prison authorities cannot prevent prisoners from seeing their wives since this is their lawful right. However, they keep procrastinating under the pretext that there are too many visit requests and that they cannot process them all at the same time.

Observers add that prison officers then take advantage of the prisoners’ need for private visits to put pressure on them and force them to reveal the names of their fellow militants in al-Qaeda camps on the border between Mauritania and Mali.

In this case, prisoners are promised to be given more privileges, like private visits, if they choose to cooperate with the authorities.

Around 28 Mauritanian citizens, who belong to al-Qaeda Organization in the Islamic Maghreb, went back to Mauritania and turned themselves in after running away from al-Qaeda’s desert camps in northern Mali.

Returnee militants decided to leave the ranks of Jihadists after the Mauritanian government promised an amnesty to al-Qaeda fighters who turn themselves in, provided that they have not engaged in terrorist activities on Mauritanian soil and on the condition that they declare giving up militant ideology.

Mauritanian president Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz also granted amnesty to several members of Salafi militant groups in response to demands made by forums held on terrorism under the auspices of the government.


(Translated from Arabic by Sonia Farid)