AUSTRALIA:Guantánamo Bay detainee David Hicks, who pleaded guilty before a US military tribunal to a charge of supporting terrorism, has been flown home to Australia to serve out the rest of his prison sentence.
A private jet chartered by the Australian government brought the 31-year-old from Cuba to a military base in his home town of Adelaide yesterday. He will spend the next seven months in the high-security unit of Yatala prison, one of Australia's toughest jails. Hicks's return was cloaked in secrecy on government orders after a public campaign that damaged prime minister John Howard's standing ahead of an election later this year.
"He's very, very glad to be back on Australian soil," said his lawyer, David McLeod, who accompanied him on the flight along with police and prison guards. "He was visibly overjoyed when we touched down."
Hicks, the first of hundreds of foreign captives held at Guantánamo to face military trial, pleaded guilty in March to a charge of providing material support to terrorism and received a seven-year sentence. Under a deal with American prosecutors, all but nine months of the sentence was suspended.
The former kangaroo skinner was captured in Afghanistan in 2001. A convert to Islam, he acknowledged during his trial that he had trained with al-Qaeda and had met Osama bin Laden.
He had watched the September 11th terror attacks at a friend's house in Pakistan but denied having had any advance knowledge of the attacks.
The Australian government had been under increasing pressure in the last year to bring Hicks home amid widespread public scepticism about his alleged role as a terrorist as well as indignation that an Australian citizen was being held by the US without trial. The support group, GetUp, which had been lobbying for Hicks's return, said the legal wrangling over the case had stained the reputation of the government and Australia.
"He was left by this government to rot in jail and it was only because of political expediency, when the public demanded action, that things started to move," said spokesman Brett Solomon.