According to secret documents issued to interrogators at
Guantanamo Bay, obtained
[10]and released by
The Guardian, "the Casio F-91W digital watch was declared to be 'the sign of
al-Qaeda' and a contributing factor to continued detention of prisoners by the analysts stationed at Guantanamo Bay. Briefing documents used to train staff in assessing the threat level of new detainees advise that possession of the F-91W and the A159W – available online for as little as £4 – suggests the wearer has been trained in bomb making by al-Qaeda in Afghanistan."
[11] United States
military intelligence officials have identified the F-91W as a watch that terrorists use in constructing
time bombs.
[12][13][14][15]
This association was highlighted in the
Denbeaux study, and may have been used in some cases at Guantanamo Bay.
[16] An article published in
The Washington Post in 1996 reported that
Abdul Hakim Murad,
Wali Khan Amin Shah, and
Ramzi Ahmed Yousef had developed techniques to use commonly available Casio digital watches to detonate time bombs.
[17] Casio watches were mentioned almost 150 times in prisoner assessments from Guantanamo.
[18]
On July 12, 2006, the magazine
Mother Jonesprovided excerpts from the transcripts of a selection of the Guantanamo detainees.
[14] The article informed readers:
More than a dozen detainees were cited for owning cheap digital watches, particularly "the infamous Casio watch of the type used by Al Qaeda members for bomb detonators."
The article quoted
Abdullah Kamel Abdullah Kamel Al Kandari:
When they told me that Casios were used by Al Qaeda and the watch was for explosives, I was shocked... If I had known that, I would have thrown it away. I'm not stupid. We have four chaplains [at Guantanamo]; all of them wear this watch.