U.S. frees Guantanamo detainee seized when a teenager

Gharani was seized in Pakistan in 2001 when a mosque he was attending was raided by Pakistan's security forces. He was ultimately turned over to the U.S. military in Afghanistan and held at a prison at Bagram air force base outside Kabul.

Two months later he was transferred to Guantanamo Bay, where Reprieve said he was subjected to a range of abuses, including being kept tightly shackled to the ground in a hunched position for hours on end and subjected to loud music and strobe lights.

The U.S. government accused Gharani of staying in an al Qaeda-affiliated guest house in Afghanistan, of fighting in the battle of Tora Bora, serving as a courier for senior al Qaeda operatives, and being a member of a London-based al Qaeda cell.

But the government failed to prove any of the allegations in court and U.S. District Judge Richard Leon ruled in January that Gharani should be freed.

Most of the accusations were based on unreliable information given by other detainees at Guantanamo, Leon said.

Gharani's release comes six months after U.S. President Barack Obama pledged to shut down Guantanamo within a year, one of the first declarations he made as president.

About 230 detainees remain at the prison, but the United States is struggling to find places to return them to.

Seventeen Uighurs, who come from China's largely Muslim region of Xinjiang in the far west of the country, have been released in the past two days, with some set to go to Bermuda and others to the Micronesian island of Palau.

(Reporting by Luke Baker; Editing by Alison Williams)