The Syrian bodyguard
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The Syrian bodyguard was one of two men taken alongside Abu Zubaydah at the safe house, and the subject of an inconsistency John Kiriakou says he was never able to resolve.

Kiriakou describes the escape attempt as it was reported to him: Abu Zubaydah tried to jump from the roof of the safe house to a neighbouring roof with two companions. One was shot to death as he leapt, dead before he hit the ground. The other, a bodyguard from Syria, was shot through the femur and was still very much alive, and became part of what Kiriakou calls the travelling road show.

The conversation

Kiriakou heard him crying in another of the hospital bays and went over. He greeted him in Arabic, as-salamu alaykum, received the reply, and asked kayf halak, which he glosses as literally meaning what is your condition. The man answered, and Kiriakou told him in English that he did not look so good.

Asked whether he was American, Kiriakou said yes, and that he was part of the team that had captured him.

The bodyguard's account contradicted the official one. He said the Pakistanis had caught him, held him down on the ground, put an AK-47 against his leg and shot him.

Kiriakou told him that was not what he had heard, that he had heard the man was jumping between rooftops to escape. At that the crying stopped immediately, and the man said he weighed 150 kilos and could not jump from a roof. Kiriakou converts the figure himself: about 330 pounds, which he says the man was.

The evidence

Kiriakou pulled the bloody sheet back from the leg. What he found was an absolutely grisly gunshot wound straight through the centre of the leg, and around it a perfect powder burn the size of a dinner plate.

A powder burn of that kind indicates a shot fired at very close range, and it settled the question of which account was true.

The unanswered question

Kiriakou's immediate reaction was anger at the Pakistanis, because he says the instruction not to shoot the men was the only direct order he gave, and they opened fire anyway.

The longer thought is more troubling to him. He says he has wondered over the years whether it was done on purpose: whether the Pakistanis wanted it so that Abu Zubaydah could not survive and could not disclose that he had colluded, perhaps with Pakistani intelligence itself. He notes that there was a reason the target's identity was never disclosed to them, and suggests this may have been it.

His conclusion is that this is a question he thinks he will never get an answer to.

See also

- Abu Zubaydah
- John Kiriakou
- The SpongeBob shirt
- The two Abu Zubaydahs
