Lawyers for an American citizen who was recently released from an Iraqi prison after serving a terrorism-related sentence have alleged that their client has been detained in Türkiye at the request of the US government.

According to POLITICO, attorneys for Shawki Ahmad Sharif Omar, who was born in Kuwait and became a US citizen in the 1980s, filed a petition in federal court in Washington on Tuesday.

The petition alleges that the US government worked with Turkish authorities to prevent Omar from re-entering the United States.

Omar is being held at a deportation center in Türkiye, but his lawyers argue that he is effectively being held in the “constructive custody” of the US government. They have asked a federal judge to order his release and return to the United States.

The case has been assigned to US District Judge John Bates, who was appointed by former President George W. Bush.

Omar, who is also a Jordanian citizen, was captured by US forces in Iraq in 2004 on allegations that he had assisted Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, then the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq.

Omar drew international attention after describing the abuse and torture he said he suffered while in US military custody.

After US authorities transferred him to Iraqi custody in 2011, he was convicted of immigration-related offenses and, several years later, of terrorism charges. He remained imprisoned on those charges until April this year.

Evidence submitted by the US government during a 2008 Supreme Court case portrayed Omar as a key intermediary for Zarqawi’s organization who “facilitated the group’s connections with other terrorist organizations, brought foreign fighters into Iraq, and planned and carried out kidnappings.”

Omar and his lawyers have argued that the US evidence supporting those allegations was weak and was never substantiated.

They have also maintained that the proceedings against him in Iraq were unfair and that he was denied the right to a fair trial. His case has attracted international attention for years.

According to his attorneys, Omar was issued a temporary US passport after being released from Iraqi custody in April, but was nevertheless placed on a no-fly list, preventing him from traveling to the United States to reunite with his wife and children, who are US citizens.

The allegation that Turkish authorities are holding Omar at Washington’s request raises new questions about the US government’s legal authority to work with foreign governments to advance its border security and immigration objectives.

It would be highly unusual for the United States to ask another country to detain a US citizen in order to prevent that individual from re-entering the country, regardless of the person’s criminal record.

According to the petition, Turkish authorities detained Omar and transferred him to a deportation center. It states that he has been held at an undisclosed facility for the past week.

The filing further alleges that Turkish officials told Omar they were acting at the request of US authorities.

The complaint also includes correspondence with US State Department officials acknowledging Omar’s detention and stating that they were working with their Turkish counterparts to verify his status.

“The government cannot claim that it lacks control over petitioner’s detention after actively exercising its authority to intervene on his behalf,” Omar’s lawyers wrote.

The attorneys also argued that Omar faces “the risk of deportation to a country where he is likely to face torture, including Jordan.”

“Jordan is a country where members of Omar’s family have been questioned about his whereabouts and activities. Moreover, given that he was previously transferred there by US authorities and subjected to torture, he also faces the risk of being tortured in Türkiye at the request of the United States,” the lawyers said.

Search and rescue operations continued across Venezuela following the powerful earthquakes that struck the country, while authorities arrested four police officers in La Guaira state for allegedly taking part in looting.

According to a report by Europa Press, those detained were officers assigned to the Scientific, Criminal and Criminal Investigations Corps.

In a statement, Venezuelan police said the four officers failed to carry out their duties during search and rescue operations and instead appropriated valuables they found in the rubble.

Criminal proceedings have been initiated against the officers, who have also been dismissed from the force.

Speaking at a press conference, Venezuelan Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello condemned the officers’ actions.

“We immediately decided to dismiss the four personnel responsible for these immoral acts. They have been handed over to the justice system in accordance with the law. We will show absolutely no tolerance toward those who act against ethical and professional standards while wearing the official uniform. It is unacceptable for anyone to seek personal gain from the suffering of others. Through these actions, they have disgraced the uniform they wore,” Cabello said.

Venezuela was struck on the evening of June 24 by two earthquakes measuring between magnitude 7.2 and 7.5, occurring roughly 40 seconds apart. As of June 30, more than 1,700 people had been confirmed dead, while more than 43,000 others remained unaccounted for.

Search efforts are continuing in the affected areas, where rescue teams are still working to pull survivors from beneath the rubble.

The earthquakes that struck in June rank among the five strongest in Venezuela’s recorded history. The magnitude 7.5 quake is reported to be the country’s most powerful earthquake in the past century.

The disaster has also been recorded as the fourth and fifth strongest earthquakes to hit Venezuela since record-keeping began in 1900.

Anthropic has decided to withdraw a covert monitoring feature designed to track whether users were located within China’s borders or had ties to Chinese artificial intelligence laboratories, following a wave of criticism on social media.

Although the US-based AI company restricts access to its services in China, Claude models are known to be widely used by developers in the country.

Earlier this week, a post on Reddit alleged that Claude Code, Anthropic’s software development tool, was secretly collecting and transmitting information indicating whether a user was located in China and whether they were affiliated with a Chinese AI laboratory.

An analysis published by cybersecurity newsletter International Cyber Digest also reported that Claude Code embedded data such as users’ time zones, proxy usage and potential links to AI laboratories into system prompts using methods that Chinese users would not easily detect.

The issue also gained traction on social media platform X, where numerous Chinese-speaking users criticized Anthropic over the practice.

Thariq Shihipar, a member of Anthropic’s technical team working on the Claude Code project, confirmed the practice in a response to International Cyber Digest’s post.

Shihipar said the feature was “an experiment launched in March to prevent account abuse by unauthorized resellers and to protect against model distillation.”

He added that the team had already been planning to remove the functionality and that it would be phased out completely in the near future.

Anthropic has previously accused Chinese AI companies DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, MiniMax and Alibaba Group of illegally using responses generated by Claude models to train their own large language models and of conducting large-scale model distillation attacks.

Although the company does not officially offer its models and services in China for national security reasons, many developers in the country continue to access Claude by using overseas phone numbers and credit cards.