Biography
Syed Fahad Hashmi is a Pakistani-American student of Brooklyn College and the London School of Economics. He was arrested on June 6, 2006 at Heathrow Airport on a U.S. federal indictment charging that he had allowed an acquaintance, Junaid Babar, to stay in his London apartment for two weeks in 2004; Babar had brought a suitcase containing socks, ponchos, and waterproof clothing that the indictment characterized as military gear destined for al Qaeda.
Hashmi was extradited to the United States in 2007 and held in 23-hour-a-day solitary confinement at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan under Special Administrative Measures for nearly three years before trial. The conditions of his pretrial detention drew international condemnation as torture; the case was a foundational one for the Center for Constitutional Rights post-9/11 detention litigation. On April 27, 2010, days before trial, he pleaded guilty to one count of providing material support to al Qaeda and was sentenced to 15 years in federal prison. Most of his sentence was served at the federal Communications Management Units. He was released on July 19, 2019.
