Montreal: The last Westerner held at Guantanamo Bay, arrested as a teen warrior for Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, returned to his native Canada on Saturday, officials said.
Omar Khadr spent a decade at the prison at the US naval base in Cuba starting when he was just 16, making him the youngest detainees held there.
The controversy over his young age made him of Guantanamo’s highest-profile detainees. First sent to the detention center for having killed a US soldier during a 2002 fight in Afghanistan, Khadr is set to serve in Canada the remainder of an eight-year prison sentence for the crime.
But under Canadian law, Khadr could be paroled in as early a one year. Canadian officials, however, said that any decision about Khadr’s future will be determined by the independent Parole Board of Canada.
Khadr, who left Guantanamo aboard a US military plane, was sent to the Millhaven maximum security prison Bath, Ontario. A total of 166 detainees still remain at Guantanamo.
“Omar Khadr is a known supporter of the Al-Qaeda terrorist network and a convicted terrorist,” Public Safety Minister Vic Toews told reporters.
Khadr has pleaded guilty to murder, providing material support for terrorism, attempted murder in violation of the law of war, conspiracy and spying.
Toews said Canada’s prison system could administer Khadr’s sentence “in a manner which recognizes the serious nature of the crimes that he has committed and ensure the safety of Canadians is protected during incarceration.”
 Born in Toronto in 1986 to a family of militants, Khadr went with his family to Pakistan as a child to help with reconstruction along the Pakistan-Afghan border following the withdrawal of Russian troops, according to an online family biography.
After 1996, the family lived in a compound in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, where a young Khadr allegedly met the late Al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden.
Khadr was only 15 when he was shot and captured by US troops in 2002 during a four-hour US ground and air attack in Afghanistan.
Now a tall man with a heavy beard and a scarred face, Khadr has been eligible for a transfer to Canada since October 2011 after pleading guilty in 2010 to five war crimes, including for throwing the grenade that claimed the life of Sergeant First Class Christopher Speer.
He filed a formal transfer request with US authorities in November.
Both Ottawa and Washington had approved his plea deal, but a final nod was delayed as Ottawa and Washington bickered over details.
“Given the Obama administration’s glacial pace toward closing the US-controlled detention center,” Amnesty International USA’s Suzanne Nossel said in a statement, “little and late though it is, today’s news represents progress.”
President Barack Obama has pledged to close the prison but the process has been delayed amid challenges identifying a willing host country, concerns about sending them home and fierce opposition from lawmakers and other senior politicians to trying the “war on terror” detainees on US soil.
Khadr’s story “underscores why Guantanamo should close — not tomorrow, but today,” said Nossel, urging Obama to “live up to his promise to close the book on the Guantanamo chapter and ensure that all detainees are either charged and fairly tried, or released.”
Transferring Khadr “ends one of the ugliest chapters in the decade-long history of Guantanamo,” said Baher Azmy, legal director for the US-based Center for Constitutional Rights.
The group called on Canada to release Khadr “immediately and provide him with appropriate counseling, education and assistance in transitioning to a normal life.”
Azmy also urged Ottawa to accept other Guantanamo detainees like Algerian Djamel Ameziane, who lived in Canada from 1995 to 2000.
Canada “should rehabilitate and reintegrate into society former child soldier Omar Khadr, and seek to remedy abuses he suffered during a decade in United States custody,” Human Rights Watch said in a statement.
American Civil Liberties Union human rights researcher Jennifer Turner, who observed most of the military commissions proceedings in Khadr’s case, stressed that “we cannot forget his decade-long imprisonment in abusive US custody.”
“Khadr was denied the fundamental rights of former child soldiers such as humane treatment, fair trial and other juvenile justice protections,” she added. “His abhorrent Guantanamo experience should never have happened.”
Khadr’s Canadian family, including his brother, welcomed his arrival and said they would visit him in prison.
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