Former Gitmo detainee who went missing back in Uruguay

A former Guantánamo Bay detainee who left Uruguay under uncertain circumstances has been sent back to that country, after being arrested in Venezuela, Uruguayan officials said Tuesday.

“He arrived early this morning,” Susana Muñiz, the director of Uruguayan health services, said on local television, according to Reuters.

Christian Mirtza, a Uruguayan government-appointed liaison to former Guantánamo detainees in the country, confirmed to the The Associated Press that Jihad Ahmed Mustafa Dhiab is back in the country.

U.S. lawmakers critical of President Obama’s plan to close the detention facility in Cuba had seized on Dhiab’s apparent disappearance to slam the administration’s continued transfer of detainees, saying it was sending detainees to countries ill-equipped to handle them.

Dhiab, a Syrian native, was sent to Uruguay in 2014 after being held at Guantánamo for 12 years. He was among a number of detainees who launched hunger strikes in protest of their detention.

Dhiab was one of six detainees sent to Uruguay, and they protested the treatment they got there, saying they weren’t receiving enough financial support. In July, a U.S. official said Dhiab was “a problem from the moment he landed in Uruguay,” citing his lack of cooperation with the government there.

In June, reports emerged that law enforcement was looking for Dhiab in Brazil after he apparently left Uruguay under uncertain circumstances. At the time, Uruguayan officials said Dhiab came to the country as a refugee free to travel as he pleases and that he hadn’t done anything wrong by leaving.

A month later, Dhiab resurfaced in Venezuela when he visited Uruguay’s consular office in Caracas to ask to be resettled in Turkey or another country outside Uruguay, so that he can live with his family.

Venezuelan authorities detained that request shortly thereafter.

While in Venezuelan custody, he launched a hunger strike when he found out he was to be sent back to Uruguay, his lawyer told Agence France-Presse.

Dhiab is currently being checked out at a hospital in the capital of Montevideo, and he appears to be doing well, Uruguayan foreign minister Rodolfo Nin Novoa said.

“He was even eating on the plane,” Nin Novoa told reporters, according to the AFP. “He will surely get the all-clear [from doctors], because he does not have any medical issues.”