Viewers in Canada and beyond are finally getting the chance to hear directly from Omar Khadr, once the youngest detainee at Guantanamo Bay prison, who has spent the last 13 of his 28 years in custody.
Khadr, a Canadian citizen who was 15 when he was shot and captured by U.S. forces in Afghanistan in 2002 and sent to Guantanamo Bay, was released on bail earlier this month after a judge in Alberta rejected a final effort by the Canadian government to keep him in jail. Khadr—the first person since World War II to be prosecuted for war crimes committed as a juvenile—will remain free while he appeals his U.S. military conviction.
All along, Toronto Star journalist Michelle Shephard followed Khadr’s case. In 2008, she published Guantanamo’s Child: the Untold Story of Omar Khadr, and now she has co-directed a documentary that premieres Thursday night on CBC-TV: Omar Khadr: Out of the Shadows.
According to CBC News, Khadr and others talk in the film about the torture he endured before and after his transfer from Guantanamo to a Canadian prison.
He describes how one prisoner would be taken from his cell for a few days and the other inmates would hear constant screaming. “Then he would come back just a destroyed person, so you can only imagine what happened to him.””