(CN) — Convicted embassy bomb plotter Ahmed Ghailani made a stride for religious liberty Wednesday inside the nation’s most notorious supermax prison.
The first Guantanamo detainee to be tried in civilian court, Ghailani has been serving a life sentence since 2011 in ADX Florence for his role acquiring materials used in the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and his native Tanzania.
The coordinated blasts from al-Qaida killed 224 people and injured thousands, in an attack widely portrayed as a precursor to the terrorist group’s more deadly strike on Sept. 11, 2001.
Known as the “Alcatraz of the Rockies,” ADX Florence is the final destination of most convicted terrorists in the United States, who typically spend 23 hours of every day in 7-by-12-foot cells.
Ghailani challenged the Colorado prison’s refusal to let him participate in Jumu’ah, a Friday group prayer that is a tenet of Islam.
On Wednesday, the Denver-based 10th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals advanced Ghailani’s argument that this violated the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
Sean Connolly, an attorney for Ghailani at the Colorado firm Zonies Law, celebrated the ruling in a phone interview.
“I’m pleased that the government must now justify denial of his right to engage in his group prayer, as required by his religion,” said Connolly, a former Oklahoma City bombing prosecutor.
Since Ghailani’s capture in Pakistan in 2004, the Tanzanian has been a fateful and complicated figure in what then had been called the U.S. war on terrorism.
The 43-year-old has portrayed himself the earliest days of custody as an unwitting dupe of al-Qaida, denying any knowledge of active plots against the United States.
Those denials, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has now confirmed, led to him to be rendered to a CIA black site and then Guantanamo Bay, where he faced brutal interrogation that his defense attorneys called “humiliating torture.”
While the full extent of Ghailani’s physical and psychological abuse remains under seal, Senate investigators revealed in the “torture report” a little more than two years ago that he suffered hallucinations from sleep deprivation and other so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques.”
In 2009, the same year that then-President Barack Obama shut down the CIA’s rendition, detention and interrogation program, his administration transferred Ghailani from Guantanamo to New York City to face trial.