Canada drops appeal for granting bail to former Guantanamo prisoner

The Canadian government said on Thursday that it is dropping its appeal of a decision to grant former Guantanamo detainee Omar Khadr bail while he fights a US conviction for murdering an American soldier.

Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale and Attorney General Jody Wilson-Raybould made the announcement in a joint statement.

A Canadian appellate court released Khadr last year after he had spent 13 years behind bars, most of it at the US prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. 

But the previous Tory administration appealed the ruling.

Back in May 2015, a Canadian court freed Khadr, rejecting previous attempts by the government to keep him in prison.

"You are free to go," Alberta Court of Appeal's Myra Bielby said on Thursday, despite pleas by the government to keep Khadr in prison while he appeals a US war crimes conviction.

Justice Bielby rejected the argument that releasing the 28-year-old would cause irreparable harm to Canada's diplomatic ties and jeopardise the pending transfers of an estimated 300 other Canadian prisoners from foreign jails.

Toronto-born Khadr was 15 years old when he was captured on an Afghan battlefield in 2002 and sent to the US prison.

In 2010, he was sentenced to eight years following a US military hearing in which he agreed to plead guilty to murdering a US soldier, attempted murder, conspiracy, providing material support for terrorism and spying.

As part of the agreement, he was sent home to Canada in 2012 to serve the remainder of his sentence.

Defence attorneys had argued Khadr was taken to Afghanistan by his father, Ahmed Said Khadr, an alleged senior al-Qaeda financier whose family stayed with Osama bin Laden briefly when Khadr was a boy.

His Egyptian-born father was killed in 2003 in a Pakistani military operation.

Khadr has frequently been called a "hardened terrorist" by the Canadian government, and former prime minister Stephen Harper's Conservative government long refused to support Khadr, reflecting ambivalence in Canada over the Khadr family.

Yet Khadr has become a beacon for civil rights campaigners who say he was a juvenile when arrested and should have been treated much more leniently by both the US and Canada.