Bin Laden Driver to Be Freed From Guantánamo Bay Within 48 Hours

Osama bin Laden's driver is to be freed from the US prison camp at Guantánamo Bay within two days, senior US officials have revealed.

Salim Ahmed Hamdan, the first al-Qaida suspect to be tried at Guantánamo, is to be transferred to his home country of Yemen where he will serve another month in jail before being released, the sources told the Washington Post.

Under an agreement with Yemen, Hamdam will be freed on December 27, they said. He will then be reunited with his wife and two young children, one of whom was he has never met.

Hamdan, thought to be 40, is expected to arrive in Yemen's capital, Sana'a, within 48 hours.

Six US military officers convicted him in August of supporting terrorism, after he admitted he continued to work as Bin Laden's driver after realizing he was working for a terrorist organization.

He was sentenced to five and a half years in prison – the bulk of which he had already served. But he was still subject to indefinite detention. The Pentagon had asked for a 30-year sentence.

In 2006 Hamdan embarrassed the Bush administration by winning a supreme court case that forced it to ditch its first Guantánamo tribunals system. It established that the charges he faced were not war crimes.

An unnamed defence official suggested to the Washington Post that that Bush administration wanted to avoid further legal challenges from Hamdan.

"We absolutely have a right to hold enemy combatants, but politically is he the guy we want to fight all the way to the supreme court?

"I think we came to the conclusion that he wasn't."

Hamdan was picked up near the border of Pakistan by a group of Afghan warlords and handed to the US in November 2001, shortly after the US-led invasion. He has been held in Guantánamo Bay since it opened in January 2002.

A Pentagon spokesman told Reuters: "It is our policy not to talk about detainee transfers until they are complete."