My Story

Mamdouh Habib & Julia Collingwood

In the early hours of 2 October 2001, Mamdouh Habib and two young German men were taken off a bus travelling between Quetta and Karachi by Pakistani security officers. It was shortly after 9/11, and only days before the United States attacked Afghanistan. The Pakistanis were rounding up anyone who looked foreign or in any way suspicious, interrogating them, and passing them on to the Americans. A few unlucky ones were then ‘rendered’ to a third-party country to be further interrogated and tortured, where they either disappeared into a web of secret prisons or were sent to Guantanamo Bay.

This is what happened to Mamdouh Habib. Branded as a terrorist, accused of attending al-Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan and of training the 9/11 terrorists in martial arts, Mamdouh Habib was incarcerated and tortured — first in Pakistan, and then in Egypt, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo. Eventually, after three-and-a-half years, he was released without charge from Guantanamo, and reunited with his wife and four children in Australia.

Here, for the first time, Mamdouh Habib reveals the full story of his journey to hell and back. He exposes the complicity of the Australian government in his abduction and maltreatment, as well as its subsequent neglect of him while in Guantanamo. He also describes his encounters with other well-known alleged terrorists, including his meetings with David Hicks both in Afghanistan and in Guantanamo.

My Story is also the account of a young Egyptian man who migrated to Australia in 1982 in order to settle down and to make a good life for himself. It is about his marriage to Maha, a remarkable young woman originally from Lebanon, who was to become his steadfast companion and who, throughout the years of their ordeal, tirelessly fought for the release of her husband and the restitution of his name.