The Obama administration is preparing to transfer a military detainee in Afghanistan for criminal trial in the state of Virginia, US officials have said.
The move would mark the first time a military detainee from Afghanistan was brought to the US for trial, and it represents the Obama administration's latest attempt to show that it can use the criminal court system to deal with terror suspects.
The prisoner, known by the nom de guerre Irek Hamidullan, is a Russian veteran of the Soviet war in Afghanistan who defected to the Taliban and stayed in the country, US officials said. He was captured in 2009 after an attack on Afghan border police and US soldiers in Khost province, officials said yesterday.
He has been in held at the US Parwan detention facility at Bagram airfield ever since. He faces up to life in prison on several charges relating to the 2009 attack, and faces trial in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia, outside Washington.
The congressional and administration officials who discussed the matter would do so only on condition of anonymity because it remained classified. Congress was notified Friday that a prisoner was going to be transferred for trial, but lawmakers were given few details, several congressional aides said.
The move is likely to spark criticism from Republican lawmakers, many of whom believe that military detainees should only be tried in military courts, and that criminal prosecutions of terror suspects undermine the notion that the US is at war with al-Qaida and other extremists.
But the Obama administration has sought to prosecute such suspects whenever possible. The administration is pursuing a criminal case against Ahmed Abu Khattala, the suspected ringleader of the 2012 attack on a US diplomatic facility in Benghazi, Libya. He was seized in a secret raid in Libya in June. And a federal judge sent Osama bin Laden's spokesman, Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, to prison for life.
The US has signed an agreement to turn over Afghan prisoners to the government in Kabul, but as of last month there were 13 non-Afghan detainees at Parwan. The Obama administration is facing pressure to transfer those detainees before December, when the US-led NATO combat mission ends.
