Canada to release ex-Guantanamo inmate for return to France: lawyer
Source: Yahoo! News / Reuters
TORONTO (Reuters) - Mourad Benchellali, a French national and former Guantanamo Bay prisoner detained by Canadian police at a Toronto airport on Monday, will likely be released and allowed to return to France within hours, his Canadian lawyer said on Wednesday.
"The details are being worked out, but they are willing to allow him to return tonight," Hadayt Nazami said in a phone interview. Benchellali would withdraw his request to enter Canada and voluntarily return to France, Nazami said.
Benchellali was arrested in 2001 at an Al Qaida training camp in Afghanistan and taken into custody by the U.S. Army. He was an inmate from January 2002 to July 2004 in the detention camp on the U.S. military base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where current and former prisoners have said they were tortured and otherwise abused.
Benchellali was set to attend a conference in Canada on preventing radicalization in prisons, but authorities arrested him because of concerns about the time he spent in Afghanistan, his lawyer said.
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