One That Got Away

The prisoners so far released from Guantnamo have included those who were grabbed by mistake. Others were deemed too young or too old to pose any threat to America. But at least one Taliban commander has slipped through the net and returned to Afghanistan vowing revenge, Taliban sources tell TIME.

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The sources, in Pakistan and Afghanistan, say that among the 16 Afghans released last July was Mullah Shehzada, a former deputy to Taliban army chief Mullah Fazal Mazloom. After leaving Guantnamo, Shehzada returned to Afghanistan and seized control of Taliban operations against U.S. forces and their Afghan allies in the southern part of the country. Shehzada, the Taliban sources say, masterminded a jailbreak in Kandahar last October in which 41 captured Taliban burrowed under prison walls with help from bribed guards. "Once a Taliban, always a Taliban," says Taliban spokesman Hamid Agha when asked why Shehzada resumed attacks on U.S. forces. "Now he wants revenge."

Shehzada and his boss, Fazal Mazloom, who is still in custody, surrendered after the Taliban defeat at Kunduz in November 2001. At the time, Shehzada was unknown to the Americans, and he melted in with the hundreds of prisoners without ID. He gave his captors a fake name. Because the Taliban considers photographs to be un-Islamic, interrogators at Guantnamo had few file photos available of the senior commanders.

Taliban sources say Shehzada convinced his U.S. captors that he had never belonged to the Taliban and had been picked up by the U.S.'s Northern Alliance allies simply because he was a Pashtun and of rival ethnicity. Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman, declined to comment on the report, saying it is Pentagon policy not to discuss any of the detainees at Guantnamo.