A government lawyer confirmed Monday that Salim Ahmed Hamdan, Osama bin Laden’s driver and the first of only two terrorism suspects convicted at the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was being transferred to his homeland of Yemen.
Hamdan, who is about 40, was found guilty of material support for terrorism by a military jury in August.
He was acquitted of the more serious charge of conspiracy and was sentenced to 5 months longer than the 5-plus years he already had served, mostly in isolation, at Guantanamo.
The disclosure that Hamdan either already was off the base or would be within hours signaled that the Bush administration had conceded that its effort to severely punish the $200-a-month Al Qaeda driver had failed.
Administration officials sought and were denied reconsideration of Hamdan’s 66-month sentence after trial by the Pentagon’s Office of Military Commissions.
Government lawyers had cast him as one who helped plot and execute the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
During Hamdan’s three-week trial, his defense lawyers elicited testimony portraying the soft-spoken defendant as a hired hand with a 4th-grade education who drove for bin Laden and at times acted as a bodyguard but was excluded from the terrorist group’s inner circle.
Nearly 100 of the 250 prisoners still at the Guantanamo Bay facility are Yemeni.
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An attorney involved with the commissions said he regarded Hamdan’s transfer as the “grease” needed to launch the repatriation of other Yemenis after years of diplomatic standoff between the U.S. and Yemeni governments.
Neither the official spokeswoman for the Joint Task Force that operates the detention facility, Navy Cmdr. Pauline Storum, nor commissions spokesman Joseph DellaVedova responded to requests for confirmation of Hamdan’s transfer. Pentagon officials routinely refuse to discuss detainee movements.
The Yemeni news agency SABA reported from the capital San’a that “well-informed sources said on Monday that U.S. authorities would extradite Salim Hamdan to Yemen in the coming few days.”