Abu Zubaydah
Saudi Arabian Guantanamo detainee (born 1971)
Abu Zubaydah ( AH-boo zuu-BAY-də; Arabic: ابو زبيدة, romanized: Abū Zubāydāh, lit. 'Father of Jewels'; born March 12, 1971, as Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn) is a Palestinian born in Saudi Arabia currently held by the U.S. in the Guantanamo Bay detention camp in Cuba. He is held under the authority of Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists (AUMF). The United States government has never officially charged him with any crime.
Believed to be a high-ranking Al-Qaeda member, Abu Zubaydah was captured in Pakistan in March 2002 and has been in United States custody ever since, including 4+1⁄2 years in the secret prison network of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). He was transferred among prisons in various countries, including a year in Poland, as part of a United States extraordinary rendition program. In 2004, media coverage of Abu Zubaydah began referring to him as a "disappeared" prisoner, stating he had no access to the International Red Cross. During his time in CIA custody, Abu Zubaydah was extensively interrogated; he was waterboarded 83 times and subjected to numerous other torture techniques including forced nudity, sleep deprivation, confinement in small dark boxes, deprivation of solid food, stress positions, and physical assaults. Videotapes of Abu Zubaydah's interrogations are among those destroyed by the CIA in 2005.
In February 2005, the CIA was reported as uncomfortable keeping Abu Zubaydah in indefinite custody, and in September 2006, Abu Zubaydah and thirteen other "high-value detainees" were transferred from CIA custody to the Guantanamo Bay detention camp. Since his transfer, the CIA has denied access to Abu Zubaydah.
“Abu Zubaydah” enters the record as saudi Arabian Guantanamo detainee (born 1971). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Zubaydah, Saudi and Arabian can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q335523. VIAF identifies the subject as 3435161098967929640004. The Library of Congress control number is no2024083104. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1971, 2002, 2004 and 2005.
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This entry incorporates text from “Abu Zubaydah” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.