Khadr gets 40-year prison sentence

Canadian citizen and former child soldier will serve only eight more years under plea bargain.

31 Oct 2010

A former child soldier in Guantanamo Bay has been sentenced to 40 years in prison for killing an American solider on an Afghan battlefield.

But Omar Khadr will only serve eight years as a result of a plea bargain struck with the US military tribunal trying him.

Khadr pleaded guilty to killing the soldier when he was 15, along with other terrorism charges, in exchange for an assurance that his sentence would be capped at eight years.

Even so, a seven-member military panel deliberated for almost nine hours before reaching the decision to hand Khadr a forty-year sentence.

US Army Colonel Patrick Parrish, the judge in the case, said that Khadr would serve another year at Guantanamo, and would then be transferred to Canada for the remainder of his sentence.

Khadr has already spent eight years at US-run prison camp at Guantanamo Bay after being captured, wounded, at the scene of a firefight between US forces and al-Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan.

Guilty of murder

During the battle, Khadr says he threw a grenade that killed a US soldier. He pleaded guilty to murder in violation of the laws of war, providing material assistance to a terrorist organization and espionage.

Human rights groups have been hugely critical of his treatment, pointing out that he was only a child when his father took him to Afghanistan to undergo al-Qaeda training.

His lawyer had called for Khadr to be sentenced to two additional years to the time he has already served, and said that his years in Guantanamo have permanently damaged him.

"There is no deradicalization program in Guantanamo," Lieutenant-Colonel Jon Jackson said, recalling a psychiatrist who testified that Khadr was beyond redemption and a danger to society.

Al Jazeera's John Terrett, reporting from Washington DC, said that the case had attracted a lot of media attention.

"It's a series of firsts and onlys. Omar Khadr was the only child soldier in Guantanamo Bay," he said.

"He's the only Canadian. He's the last Westerner left there, and he's the only one charged with murder in a battlefield situation."

Source: Al-Jazeera.
Link: http://english.aljazeera.net/news/americas/2010/10/20101031221056245624.html.