Guantanamo inmate freed in Sudan

MIAMI – The United States sent home to Sudan on Tuesday one of Guantanamo’s longest-held prisoners, a 52-year-old confessed al-Qaida foot soldier and sometime driver for Osama bin Laden whose release was seen as a crucial test case of the Barack Obama-era war court.

Ibrahim al-Qosi pleaded guilty to terror charges in July 2010 in exchange for the possibility of release after serving a two-year sentence.

U.S. troops spirited him from the remote base days after his war crimes sentence ran out and dropped him off in the capital city Khartoum early today, U.S. government sources said.

The Pentagon has not yet disclosed the transfer – which reduced the number of foreign prisoners at the Navy base in Cuba to 168 – to give Sudanese officials time to put the returnee in a rehabilitation program in the Horn of Africa nation.

But the repatriation demonstrated that the Obama administration is still in the business of deal-making and downsizing the prison camps even as the Defense Department is planning to spend $40 million on an undersea telecommunications cable to the base in southeast Cuba.

The release of al-Qosi was the first of a convicted war criminal since the Bush administration sent home Yemeni Salim Hamdan in 2008. Al-Qosi’s attorney argued the U.S. had no reason to fear the Sudanese man.

“He is now in his 50s, eager only to spend his life at home with his family in Sudan – his mother and father, his wife and two teenage daughters, and his brothers and their families – and live among them in peace, quiet and freedom,” said Washington, D.C., attorney Paul Reichler, who defended al-Qosi without charge for seven years.