Adel bin Muhammad El Ouerghi, former Guantanamo Bay detainee married Roma Blanco, Uruguayan who converted to Islam.
24-year-old Roma Blanco described Adel, 50 to be everything that a woman expects from a man.
“Adel is humble, respectful, nice and very gentlemanly,” Blanco said. “He is everything that a woman can expect from a man.”
She liked her husband’s sincerity, and how he treated her 5-year-old son from her past relationship.
Roma said she converted to Islam four months ago and planned to take the name Samira. She and Adel met at a mosque a month ago.
With a light purple scarf and a violet jacket with gold-colored lacing and henna designs on her hands she ready for her wedding with Adel.
The wedding ceremony took place in the two-bedroom apartment where the couple plans to live. Samir Selim, an imam and director of the Egyptian Islamic Center in Montevideo, solemnize the marriage ceremony.
Irina Posadas, another Uruguayan woman who embraced Islam, said she and 34-year-old husband-to-be Omar Abdelhadi Faraj, from Syria, planned to get married on Saturday would be postponed one week.
“I believe in Islam and I’m going to marry [by the rules of] Islam,” she said.
Posadas, after converting to Islam a year-and-a-half ago started presenting herself as Fatima.
Posadas, a Chinese teacher met Faraj in February. The native Uruguayan, Posadas lived in Taiwan for 26 years and has a child from a previous relationship.
“Omar is very intelligent and a good communicator,” she said. “I don’t want him to be seen as a former prisoner, but rather a regular person.”
Faraj and Adel have frequently expressed a desire to wed and start families in Uruguay.
Adel, in February he had been married to a Pakistani woman while living in Afghanistan. He said she divorced him when he was in Guantanamo.
Roma was not interested in Adel’s past, before Guantanamo or during his time there.
“I know that he was tortured, but I haven’t wanted to dig in his wounds,” she said. “I’ve told him that when he wants to, he can tell me about [it], and he has said he would.”
The two men and four other ex-detainees were relocated in Uruguay in December after spending almost 13 years in Guantanamo. All were apprehended in Afghanistan in 2002 with alleged ties to al-Qaida. The men were never convicted and the U.S. government decided to release them.