Ammar Al-Baluchi (, ; also transliterated as Amar Al-Balochi, born Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, 29 August 1977) is a Pakistani citizen in U.S. custody at Guantanamo Bay detention camp. Charges against him include "facilitating the 9/11 attackers, acting as a courier for Osama bin Laden and plotting to crash a plane packed with explosives into the U.S. consulate in Karachi." A member of the same al-Baluchi clan as Khalid Sheikh Muhammad (KSM) and Ramzi Yousef, U.S. officials state that he was a "key Lieutenant" of his uncle KSM who assisted KSM in the execution of the September 11 attacks, and that he told investigators that he had sought help in al-Qaeda's efforts to develop biological weapons to use against its enemies. He reportedly married and then divorced Aafia Siddiqui, the Pakistani scientist convicted of shooting at US soldiers and incarcerated in the United States. He was arrested in 2003 and held in the Salt Pit, a CIA black site in Afghanistan, during which he was extensively tortured. The CIA used Baluchi as a "training prop" to teach torture techniques to interrogators; trainees took turns shoving his head into a wall in sessions which lasted for hours, causing him brain damage. He was also doused with ice water and kept in stress positions. His torture did not yield the CIA any useful intelligence. Baluchi was transferred to the Guantanamo Bay detention camp in 2006. In 2018, the United Nations called for his immediate release from arbitrary detention. Early life Ammar al-Baluchi was born in Al Ahmadi, Kuwait, and is the maternal nephew of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (organizer of the 9/11 attacks) and cousin of Ramzi Yousef, the organizer of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. The extended family of al-Baluchi is ethnically Baluchi and originally from Balochistan. The family patriarch and his brother were lay Deobandi preachers. They moved the family to Kuwait in the 1960s. Baluchi grew up in Kuwait but spent most of teenage years in Iranian Baluchistan, but is a citizen of Pakistan. Trained as a computer technician, he dressed in Western clothes and "introduced himself as a businessman", but had been "groomed ... since boyhood" by his cousins and uncles "to join their clandestine war," according to journalist Debra Scroggins. According to a U.S. government biography, his "chief mentor" was his cousin and 1993 World Trade Center bombing orchestrator Ramzi Yousef, "who taught him in the early