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US ready to free youngest inmate of Guantanamo
Ed Harris30 Jul 2009
The Obama administration has proposed sending the youngest prisoner held at the US prison at Guantanamo Bay back to Afghanistan - where his lawyer said he would probably go free.
Afghanistan has requested that Mohammed Jawad - accused of throwing a grenade that wounded two American soldiers and their Afghan interpreter in Kabul in late 2002 - be returned to his country. Officials even offered to send a plane to collect Jawad, who claimed to be 12 when he was arrested in 2002.
In the latest effort to close the detention facility, US government lawyers filed a plan with an American court that would release Jawad to the custody of a foreign government in about three weeks. "They came to the same conclusion that everyone else came to, that he's innocent," one of Jawad's military lawyers, Major David Frakt, said.
US District Judge Ellen Huvelle was due to hear arguments in the case today. At the previous hearing, she encouraged Jawad's release.
