Mehdi Mohammad Ghezali (Arabic: مهدي محمد غزالي; born 5 July 1979), in media previously known as the Cuban-Swede (Swedish: Kubasvensken), is a Swedish citizen of Algerian and Finnish descent who was held in extrajudicial detention in the United States Guantanamo Bay detainment camp in Cuba between January 2002 and July 2004.

[3] A man bearing Ghezali's passport was one of twelve foreigners Pakistani security officials reported were captured trying to cross into Afghanistan on 28 August 2009.

[4][5][6] According to the Associated Press Ghezali was "reportedly part of a group of 156 suspected al-Qaeda fighters caught while fleeing Afghanistan's Tora Bora mountains.

Mehdi Ghezali was born in Botkyrka, Stockholm, on 5 July 1979 and grew up in Örebro, the son of an Algerian and a Finnish woman.

Ghezali was apprehended by the Portuguese police in the Algarve region of Portugal on 31 July 1999 for a suspected bank robbery and a jewelry theft together with his partner Stavros Christos Toilos.

[citation needed] However, he was not accepted and returned to Sweden in March or April 2001 for a brief period before travelling to London where he studied at the madrasah of the Muslim cleric Omar Bakri.

[citation needed] After failing to gain acceptance into any of the madrasahs, he then travelled to Afghanistan, where he, according to his own statements, stayed with a family in Jalalabad.

"[12] "Sweden's security police chief, Jan Danielsson, described Ghezali more as a confused youth traveling the world looking for spiritual fulfillment rather than a terrorist.

"[7] After the U.S. military, together with the Afghan Northern Alliance, initiated a bombing campaign on the Tora Bora mountains, a large number of al-Qaeda sympathisers and others in the affected areas fled southward to Pakistan.

[14] On 15 May 2006, the United States Department of Defense released a list of all the individuals who had been held in military custody in their Guantanamo Bay detainment camps.

[citation needed] After being held as an enemy combatant for 930 days, Ghezali was released into the custody of the Swedish government on 8 July 2004 since he was no longer considered a threat to the United States, since he had no information that was of interest to the American Intelligence Service and since he had not committed a crime which could be proven in a military court.

[citation needed] Initially, Swedish prosecutors stated that they would press charges against him for crimes committed prior to Ghezali's departure from Sweden, but they were subsequently dropped.

[18] Ghezali has stated in his book that he feels he is being intensely monitored by the Swedish Security Service (SÄPO), both in his home and when he moves around.

He claims to have been subject to torture such as sleep deprivation and made to sit in an interrogation room for thirteen hours in a row.

Ghezali, who declined to answer any questions from reporters, and the other demonstrators also appeared in support of Oussama Kassir, the Swedish citizen at the time being held in the Czech Republic for alleged involvement with al-Qaeda.

On 10 September 2009, the Swedish television programme Rapport reported that Ghezali was among a group of twelve foreign citizens who had been arrested one week earlier in the Dera Ghazi Khan District in Punjab, Pakistan, on suspicions of having ties to al-Qaeda.

Ghezali is reported to have explained that the group were traveling to Lahore to participate in what Swedish newspaper The Local described as "a harmless meeting with a Muslim revivalist movement, Tablighi Jamaat."

Swedish paper The Local reported one additional anonymous allegation, that the group "were found in a prohibited area near a nuclear power facility."

[36][37][38] The asserted that Ghezali and his companions had made a last-minute decision, during a tour of middle eastern countries, to alter their plans to include Pakistan in their itinerary.

They expressed concern that the press speculation that his travel to Pakistan had been inspired by support for Islamic extremism was unfair and unsupported by any evidence.