Probable bin Laden guard released from Guantanamo

There are 114 detainees remaining at the detention facility in Guantanamo Bay. Shalabi protested his imprisonment with a hunger strike.

Shalabi’s brother had been transferred out of Guantanamo to Saudi Arabia during George W. Bush’s presidency.

WASHINGTON-The Obama administration announced Tuesday it has transferred a Saudi Arabian national from the prison facility at Guantanamo Bay back to his native Saudi Arabia.

“The board also considered the detainee’s well-established family, their willingness and ability to support him upon his return, and their prior success in assisting with the rehabilitation and reintegration of a former Guantánamo detainee,” the review panel said.

The U.S. Department of Defense said that Shalabi was a member of radical Islamist militant group Al-Qaeda, and worked as a bodyguard for Bin Laden-who masterminded the 9/11 attacks in New York in 2001, and who was killed by US marines in a Pakistan raid in May, 2011.

The Periodic Review board that guided Shalabi to the exit offered the following reasons for their decision, ranging from his terror sins are “in the past” and he has since lived a “quiet” life. He was among the first batch of detainees brought to the prison when it opened at the American naval station in Cuba on January 11, 2002.

The administration is working to release as many cleared prisoners as possible before 2017 to help Obama make good on a campaign promise to close the prison. A parole board lifted that designation in June, approving his release in a statement that expressed confidence in the Saudis’ rehabilitation program for Islamic extremists.