Yussef al-Shihri

Who is Yussef al-Shihri?

Yussef Mohammed Mubarak al-Shihri was a citizen of Saudi Arabia who was held in extrajudicial detention in the United States's Guantanamo Bay detention camps, in Cuba. He was born on September 8, 1985, in Riyadh Saudi Arabia.

At the age of sixteen, he was captured along with his older cousin as part of a large group of 120 soldiers near Kunduz, and transferred to Shiberghan prison for six weeks, before being flown to Guantanamo on January 16, 2002.

On June 15, 2005 Human Rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith identified Al Shihri as one of a dozen teenage boys held in the adult portion of the prison. According to Smith Al Shihri was 13 years old when captured. Smith observed that official US documents referred to this dozen minors solely by their initials, because US law prohibits identifying minors. Official documents referred to Al Shihri as YAS.

An October 2009 article in the Saudi Gazette asserts his older brother Saad Muhammad Al-Shehri took him to Afghanistan after he finished "intermediate school". Yussef Al-Shehri went through the Saudi militant rehabiliation program following his repatriation from Guantanamo. He was named on Saudi Arabia's list of most wanted terrorist suspects on February 3, 2009. He was killed in a shootout with Saudi police, while apparently preparing to commit a suicide attack wearing an explosive belt on October 18, 2009.