A Canadian former child soldier told jailers he comforted himself at Guantanamo by thinking about killing a US soldier, military prosecutors said on Thursday in opening arguments at the war-crimes trial of the youngest inmate at the detention center.
Toronto-born Omar Khadr, who was 15 when he was captured in 2002, is accused of throwing a grenade that killed a Delta Force medic after a firefight in Afghanistan.
“Omar Khadr is a terrorist, trained by al-Qaeda to murder Sergeant 1st Class Christopher Speer,” prosecutor Jeff Groharing told a jury of US military officers inside a hilltop courthouse at the US Navy base in southeast Cuba.
“He said when he first arrived at Guantanamo, thinking about killing an American would make him feel better,” Groharing said. “When asked what he was most proud of in his life, he said conducting the operations against the Americans.”
Khadr denies throwing the grenade and his lawyers argued that his purported confessions were extracted through mistreatment, including threats of rape.
In his opening statement, Army Lieutenant Colonel Jon Jackson, a Pentagon-appointed defense attorney, said the teen was at the al-Qaeda compound at the time of the firefight because he was sent there by his father, an alleged terrorist financier with close ties to Osama bin Laden.
Khadr has pleaded not guilty to five charges, including murder, spying and supporting terrorism. He faces a maximum life sentence at a trial expected to last roughly three or four weeks.
The case has been delayed for years by legal wrangling and a series of challenges to the system of war-crimes trials.
Khadr’s trial centers on the July 27, 2002, battle at a mud-walled al-Qaeda compound in eastern Afghanistan. Prosecutors introduced a model of the site and pointed out the corner from which Khadr allegedly lobbed the grenade as special forces entered following a nearly four-hour firefight.
The grenade exploded at the feet of Speer, a 28-year-old father of two from Albuquerque, New Mexico. His widow, Tabitha Speer, watched the proceedings inside the courtroom, but was not expected to testify until a possible sentencing hearing.
Khadr himself was shot twice during the battle and lost vision in one eye from a shrapnel injury. The bearded Canadian detainee, now 23, appeared in a suit and tie in the same courtroom where he first appeared in 2006.
The defendant’s father, Ahmed Said Khadr, was an Egyptian-born Canadian citizen killed in 2003 when a Pakistani military helicopter shelled the house where he was staying with senior al-Qaeda operatives.
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