Release of Afghans from Guantanamo Bay raises the hopes of relatives

Heartened by the release this week of three elderly Afghan prisoners after months of detention in an American high security camp at Guantanamo Bay, Issa Khan's six sisters anxiously await any word of their missing brother. He was captured almost a year ago and remains among the 57 Pakistanis still undergoing interrogation by the Americans in tropical holding cells for suspected terrorists.

At the family farm near Bannu, in Pakistan's Northwest Frontier Province, Mohamad Azeem fetches one of four creased letters which have arrived from his son, return address: Camp X-ray, Washington DC, USA.

"Dear Mum and Dad," reads Issa's carefully pencilled script. "I am in an American jail. I am being questioned but don't worry. I have no connection with the Taliban or their interpretation of our religion. I pray in my jail that, Insh'allah, I will come home soon because I am innocent." Such a message would have distressed most families, but when the turbanned postman delivered this mysterious little note in March, the village of Kotka Miralam Daud Shah erupted with joy. "We were so happy to learn Issa is with the Americans," Mr Azeem explained. "We thought our son had been killed."

Issa Khan, described by his father as a brave Pashtun who is a bit too fond of hashish, had the misfortune of being across the border in Mazar-e-Sharif when the bombing started in November last year. Talk about being in the wrong place at the wrong time: the lovelorn young man, who had pledged to his new wife that he would go to the ends of the world for her, wound up 6,000 miles away, locked behind razor wire, his lustrous beard shaved off.

His friends and family tell it as a tragic love story. For months on end, Issa Khan couldn't concentrate. He was longing for green-eyed Fahima, the Afghan judge's daughter he'd courted and wed. He had rashly agreed to let her show off their new baby son to the grandparents, and she travelled with Afghan relatives to their hometown, Mazar-e-Sharif. But the 28-year-old homeopath was growing lonesome at his frontier clinic back in Peshawar. There seemed to be no remedy for the melancholy of interrupted passion. Issa set off on a lorry, hoping to hitch his way to Mazar-e-Sharif on the cheap. But then the bombs started falling.

According to Pakistani intelligence sources, the Americans put a price on the terrorists' heads, hoping to get rapid results from Northern Alliance allies with mercenary tendencies. Bounty hunters rounded up hundreds of low-level fighters. Prisoners claim that any male wandering near the battlegrounds was grabbed and forced to confess. Old scores were settled. Some men were allegedly sent on a one-way trip to Guantanamo after they were unable to meet extortion demands from the secret police in Kandahar, who denounced them as followers of Osama Bin Laden.

Authorities concede privately that as many as 100 of the "hard core terrorists" now marooned in Guantanamo were grabbed by mistake.

Pakistani officials have requested that 50 of the detainees be returned to Pakistan because they pose no threat. To the delight of Issa Khan's family, the US Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, announced last week that Guantanamo would set some men free.

The Khan family have sent petitions pleading for news of their son's return. They got one curt notice from the Red Cross that their paperwork has been received. A homecoming party is already in the works.