On really bad days, Lutfi Bin Ali retrieves his Guantánamo Bay suit from under a pile of clothes and pulls it on. The outfit, which by this point has faded from its infamous orange colour to more of a salmony pink, reminds him he was once worse off than he is now, and helps him to calm down.  Sometimes, though, he wonders if his current predicament might actually be even worse than the 13 years he spent in the notorious prison. Lonely and isolated in the Kazakh steppe, the 51-year-old Tunisian has found life since his release from Guantánamo no easier than life inside.  “At least in Guántanamo there were people to talk to. Here I have nobody,” Bin Ali said during the Guardian’s two-day visit to his new home, a dusty town in northern Kazakhstan famed for being a Soviet nuclear testing site.  Bin Ali was captured on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border in late 2001, and claims to have spent time in CIA black sites before being transferred to Guantánamo several months later. US intelligence accused him of associating with known al-Qaida members in Afghanistan and of being part of a Tunisian jihadi cell. He denied all the claims, insisting he went to Pakistan and Afghanistan to find a wife and escape minor problems with the law in Italy, where he had lived for more than a decade previously.  According to a leaked Guantánamo internal assessment, Bin Ali was recommended for release or transfer to another country for continued detention in June 2004. Based on his “health status, intelligence value and risk level” the US defence department judged Bin Ali to pose a “low risk”. It was more than a decade before he would finally be freed.  As the Obama administration has attempted to shut down Guantánamo, increased efforts have been made to transfer the detainees to their home nations, or third countries. Bin Ali said he could not go back to Tunisia after being branded a terrorist by the Americans – he risked jail there.  Many former prisoners, Yemenis, Tunisians and Libyans, have been transferred to third countries where they are placed in rehabilitation programmes.  Usually they are funded by the host country, but the Kazakhstan programme is financed by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). The two-year programme was meant to see the former prisoners slowly integrate into Kazakh society. The reality has been rather different.  Bin Ali has a serious heart condition that required an operation to install an artificial valve in 1999, and his US lawyer, Mark Denbeaux, said he had persuaded Bin Ali to accept the transfer to Kazakhstan based on what US authorities told him.  “They explained to me that Kazakhstan was a Muslim country, it had an excellent healthcare system, and they had a programme to take care of him. After two years he would be free to leave. None of what I was told turned out to be true,” Denbeaux said.  When I arrived, it was -30 outside and I was still in Guantanamo flip-flops  At the end of 2014, Bin Ali, along with another Tunisian detainee and three Yemenis, were transferred to Kazakhstan. The five were flown out on a military aircraft, hands and feet cuffed, and two days and several changes of transport later, Bin Ali and one of the Yemenis arrived in Semey, a town near Kazakhstan’s border with Russia. The other three were sent to Kyzylorda, hundreds of miles away in southern Kazakhstan.  After the long journey, Bin Ali was taken to a temporary apartment in Semey late on New Year’s Eve. Outside there were fireworks and drunken celebrations. Inside, it was freezing.  “It was minus 30 outside and I was still in Guantánamo flip-flops, because none of the shoes they had were big enough. I was expecting a Muslim country and it wasn’t what I expected,” he said.  Semey, called Semipalatinsk until 2007, is a sleepy town of dilapidated Soviet-era apartment blocks home to around 300,000 people, more than 500 miles from Kazakhstan’s largest city, Almaty. It is mainly known for its location next to the “poligon”, an area of steppe where the Soviets carried out nuclear tests. Radiation levels are still well above average in the area, and many believe the tests have led to all manner of health problems.  The town’s isolation and its climate of hot, dusty summers and punishingly cold winters drove Fyodor Dostoevsky to distraction during the five years he spent in exile in the town, where he had seizures and sank into depression. “I live in Semipalatinsk, which bores me to death. Life has become intolerable for me,” the novelist wrote in a letter in 1858.  More than 150 years later, Bin Ali has similar feelings about the town. Few people speak English and he has found only one person, the imam of the mosque, who speaks any Arabic. At 6ft 6in (198cm), he is a foot taller than most of the town’s residents, and cannot find shoes or clothes to fit.  After their arrival, the Guantánamo five were told they would not be able to leave the confines of their host cities, and Bin Ali was not given proper care for his heart condition.  Four months after the men were transferred, one of the Yemenis in Kyzylorda, Asim al-Khalaqi, became ill. “He was more and more ill but they didn’t believe it,” said Adel Hkimi, another Yemeni transferred to Kyzylorda, by telephone. “He was weak. He couldn’t go out, so I did shopping for him. I asked to stay overnight to look after him but they wouldn’t let me. He became sadder and angrier. He was unable to walk, or to go to the toilet.”  Finally, when it became clear just how serious the condition was, Khalaqi was taken to hospital. He died the next day.  Suffering from worsening heart palpitations that kept him awake at night, Bin Ali feared the same fate. Eventually, earlier this year, he was given an operation to install another artificial valve in Astana, Kazakhstan’s capital. The whole week he was there he was guarded by police.  “They picked him up, broke him, and threw him away,” said Denbeaux of the US treatment of Bin Ali. He said while the conditions in Kazakhstan might be intolerable, the Kazakhs had been “doing the Americans a favour” by agreeing to take the detainees, and it was the US who must bear responsibility for the situation. “In their race to empty out Guantánamo, they are leaving people who are released in unsustainable circumstances.”  Some Kazakh officials resent the complaints. After all, Bin Ali could well be a dangerous terrorist as far as they know, and he has been given an allowance, access to medicines and a spacious flat that is luxurious by local standards, with green faux-leather sofas and imitation malachite columns.  But it is little more than a gilded cell. His only document is a flimsy, handwritten Kazakh docket saying he is “a person seeking refugee status”, and he is explicitly banned from leaving the confines of the town, let alone the country. When the Guardian visited, the police arrived within half an hour, ostensibly to “say hello”. They demanded information on the visitor and took down passport and accreditation details.  “I think they have good conditions in their daily life. The problem is they have no future there, and that has to do with the restrictions of the Kazakh government,” said Jens-Martin Mehler of the ICRC’s regional delegation in central Asia.  It is understandable that the Kazakhs are suspicious. A report issued last week suggested nine Guantánamo detainees have rejoined militant groups since 2009, and the lack of any trials means it is hard to officials to distinguish between real terrorist masterminds and those arrested in error.  Bin Ali insists there is no truth to allegations that he had links to al-Qaida. He readily admits he got into scrapes with the law before his arrest, but says they were all about petty crime rather than extremism. Born in 1965 in Tunis, he left school at 12 and worked as a furniture maker. As he turned 20 he moved to Italy on the suggestion of friends and relatives and began a 14-year period moving around the country from Milan to Brindisi.  In 1998 he decided to move to Pakistan. In his telling, he was motivated by cash, not Islam. “I did business with a lot of Pakistan people, I heard there was lots of good business there.” When he got there, he had problems with the police and fled to Afghanistan. He said he spent only a month in Afghanistan, during which time he had no contact with any terrorists and never handled a weapon. He had decided the whole venture was pointless and wanted to return to Italy, via Pakistan. He was arrested by Pakistani forces in a town just across the border.  It is possible that Bin Ali’s portrayal of himself as a wheeler dealer and occasional petty criminal could be a cover, but little in the leaked Guantánamo documents seems to suggest any hard evidence against him, and he has never been brought before any kind of court to answer any charges.  In his new life in Semey, he has almost no company except Sabri al-Qurashi, the Yemeni Guantánamo detainee. He has learned basic Russian but locals are afraid of talking to him.  When he is in a good mood, he enjoys cooking, although he wishes he had more people to cook for. For a visiting Guardian journalist he cooked numerous imitations of Italian dishes, which were impressive given the limitations of locally available ingredients.  “Cooking is my passion. I dream of cooking for 10 or 20 people. I want to open a small restaurant here, it would be wonderful. I’d do Italian food, and Sabri could do the desserts, the cakes. But the local authorities said no. They don’t want us to be visible.”  Instead, he has busied himself with painting. He also wants to write a Guantánamo memoir, but he struggles to concentrate and has trouble using a computer due his poor vision, damaged during his stay in Guántanamo. “It feels like there is a football match going on inside my head,” he said.  Often, he sits at home in the dark. His toes are mangled from years of walking barefoot on prison floors and being held in stress positions, and he walks with a pronounced limp. He cuts a forlorn, incongruous figure as he shuffles through the streets of Semey.  Sometimes he thinks about putting on his orange suit, sealing his mouth with tape, and going into the main square to announce he is on hunger strike, until he receives a transfer somewhere else. He has decided against it though, on the basis that it would probably land him in a Kazakh jail, and he is not sure anyone would notice anyway.  “I’m not angry, I just wish I would be left alone. I am 51 years old, my heart is as weak as a bird’s heart, and I am in constant pain. I think all the time about a wife, about making some kids. Will I ever have the chance to live a normal life?”
Sent to a remote border town in a strange country, Lutfi Bin Ali describes an isolated existence haunted by 13 years in the world’s most notorious prison