U.S. frees Guantanamo detainee seized when a teenager

By Luke Baker

LONDON (Reuters) - An African detainee held at the U.S. prison camp at Guantanamo Bay since he was a teenager has been released without charge after more than seven years in captivity, his lawyers said on Thursday.

Mohammed El Gharani, a Chadian citizen, was freed five months after a U.S. federal judge ordered him released having reviewed the evidence against him and ruled that there was nothing to suggest he was ever an "enemy combatant."

Lawyers for Gharani said he was the youngest detainee to be released from Guantanamo, having been seized in 2001 when he was 14.

But the Pentagon disputes his age, saying they believed he was now 23, and that there were others held at Guantanamo Bay over the past seven years who had been younger.

"Our records indicate that he is 23 and that he arrived at Guantanamo when he was 16," said Navy Commander Jeffrey Gordon, a Pentagon spokesman. He said there was no birth certificate for Gharani but that his age had been established "by other means."

Reprieve, a legal and human rights group that campaigned for Gharani's release, said he had already returned to Chad.

"It is great news that Mohammed has at last been released, but he will never get back the teenage years that were spent in Guantanamo based on shamefully shoddy intelligence," said Clive Stafford Smith, Gharani's lawyer and the director of Reprieve.

"The idea that it took seven years and a federal judge to sort this out demonstrates just how failed an experiment Guantanamo Bay is."