ABX, YesTAM's source was Wikepedia. Hicks was captured by an Afgan warlord and sold to the Northern Alliance authorities for USD 1000. What YesTAM failed to convey, was the preceding paragraphs in the Wikepedia report. Interesting reading!
[edit] Early life
David Hicks was born in Adelaide, South Australia, son of Terry and Susan, who are British citizens by birth. He has one sister. His parents separated when he was ten years old, his father later remarrying.[11][12] Hicks was expelled from school at age 14.[13]
Described by his father as "a typical boy who couldn't settle down",[13] and by his old school mates from Salisbury High as a heavy drinker and cannabis smoker who would use a compass to scratch satanic symbols into his arm,[5] Hicks moved between various jobs. These jobs included skinning kangaroos at a meat-packing factory, fishing for sharks, and working at a series of outback cattle stations in the Northern Territory, Queensland, and South Australia. It was at a cattle station that he met his wife by common-law Jodie Sparrow in 1992. Hicks and Sparrow had two children before separating in 1996. He eventually lost contact with his two young children. "He used to pinch cars and you know, that sort of stuff. Like, that was the only way he sort of fed himself and that." remembers Sparrow. [13][5] After their separation Hicks moved to Japan to become a horse trainer.[13]
[edit] Militant activity
David Hicks, on the left, posing with a Rocket propelled grenade (RPG) on his first day of training with the KLA in Albania [14]In 1999, Hicks traveled to Albania, where he joined the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), a paramilitary organization of ethnic Albanians fighting against Serbian forces in the Kosovo War, and served with them for two months. [15] On returning to Australia Hicks applied to join the Australian Army but was rejected due to his low level of formal education.[5] Hicks then converted to Islam and began to study Arabic.[16]
On November 11, 1999,[14] Hicks traveled to Pakistan to study Islam.[17] After a period of time he began training with the Lashkar-e-Toiba [18] learning guerrilla warfare, weapons training (including landmines), kidnapping techniques, and assassination methods.[2] In a March 2000 letter, Hicks told his family
"don't ask what's happened, I can't be bothered explaining the outcome of these strange events has put me in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir in a training camp. Three months training. After which it is my decision whether to cross the line of control into Indian-occupied Kashmir."[19]
In another letter on August 10, 2000, Hicks wrote from Kashmir, claiming to have been a guest of Pakistan's army for two weeks at the front in the "controlled war" with India.[19] At the time, Lashkar-e-Toiba was an Islamic fighting group that had widespread support in Pakistan. It had a reputation for being focused on fighting India in Kashmir but was also accused of attacks against Indian civilians. After the September 11, 2001 attacks and its banning as a terrorist group by Pakistan in January 2002, Lashkar-e-Toiba fragmented and branched out into sectarian violence.[20][21] Lashkar-e-Toiba was banned in Australia in 2003.[22]
A "resentful and deeply unflattering" handwritten memoir signed by Feroz Abbasi while incarcerated in Guantanamo Bay, later repudiated by Abbasi on October 20, 2004, in another signed statement, claimed Hicks was "Al-Qaedah's 24 ct. [carat] Golden Boy" and "obviously the favorite recruit" of their al-Qaeda trainers during exercises at the al-Farouq camp near Kandahar.[23]The failed British shoe bomber Richard Colvin Reid was another graduate of the camp. The memoir made a number of (hearsay) allegations, including that Hicks was teamed in the training camp with Filipino recruits from the Moro Islamic Liberation Front and that during internment in Camp X-Ray, "Hicks [said] he was praying to Satan for help". Hicks "attended a number of al-Qaeda training courses at various camps around Afghanistan, including an advanced course on surveillance, in which he conducted surveillance of the US and British embassies in Kabul, Afghanistan". [2] On one occasion when al-Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden visited an Afghan camp, Hicks questioned bin Laden about the lack of English in training material and subsequently "began to translate the training camp materials from Arabic to English".[2] Hicks wrote home that he'd met Osama bin Laden 20 times, later telling investigators that he'd exaggerated. He'd seen bin Laden about eight times and spoken to him only once.[24]Prosecutors also allege Hicks was interviewed by Muhammad Atef, an al-Qaeda military commander, about his background and "the travel habits of Australians".[2] The US Department of Defense statement claimed "that after viewing TV news coverage in Pakistan of the Sept 11, 2001, attacks against the United States, [Hicks] returned to Afghanistan to rejoin his al-Qaeda associates to fight against US, British, Canadian, Australian, Afghan, and other coalition forces [...] It is alleged Hicks armed himself with an AK-47 automatic rifle, ammunition, and grenades to fight against coalition forces."[2]
Hicks spoke to his parents from just outside the southern Afghan city of Kandahar in November 2001. "He said something about going off to Kabul to defend it against the Northern Alliance," Terry Hicks said.