Bin Laden's driver gets five and a half years in prison

A jury of US military officers sentenced Osama bin Laden's driver to five-and-a-half years in prison yesterday for providing material support for terrorism, concluding the first US war crimes tribunal since World War II.

The judge gave Salim Hamdan credit for 61 months, so he could be out in five months. The US government has, however, argued it can detain Mr Hamdan and other "enemy combatants" indefinitely as long as the war on terrorism continues.

The sentence was delivered by the same six jurors who convicted Yemeni captive Salim Hamdan in the tribunal at Guantanamo prison camp authorised by the Bush administration to try non-US captives on terrorism charges outside regular US courts.

Mr Hamdan earlier yesterday apologised in his sentencing hearing for any pain his services to al Qaeda caused its US victims.

"I don't know what could be given or presented to these innocent people who were killed in the US," Mr Hamdan told a jury of six military officers deciding his fate after convicting him of providing material support for terrorism.

"I personally present my apologies to them if anything I did have caused them pain," he said through an Arabic-English interpreter.

A forensic psychiatrist who interviewed the Yemeni captive behind the razor wire at the US naval base in Cuba reported that Mr Hamdan wept when he first saw videotape of planes crashing into the World Trade Towers in the September 11 attacks, and that he prayed for the victims. Prosecutor John Murphy suggested the tears and remorse were fake and said Mr Hamdan should be locked away for at least 30 years.

His actions "changed our world as we knew it, changed it dramatically in our lifetime and perhaps changed it forever," Mr Murphy said. "His penalty should be so significant that it forecloses any possibility that he re-establishes his ties with terrorists."

Defence lawyer Charles Swift said Mr Hamdan deserved a sentence of less than four years because his cooperation with US intelligence services more than outweighed his culpability as a member of bin Laden's motor pool in Afghanistan.

He said Mr Hamdan never shared bin Laden's ideology and he was merely a paid driver ridiculed by al Qaeda insiders as "a simple Bedouin who changed the oil".

The six jurors, whose names are secret, convicted Mr Hamdan on Wednesday on charges of providing material support for terrorism by working as a driver and occasional armed bodyguard and weapons courier for bin Laden in Afghanistan from 1996 to November 2001.

Mr Hamdan said he was stunned to learn his boss was behind the bombing of the USS Cole warship in a Yemeni port in 2000. But he went back to work for him because he could not find another job that paid enough to support his family.

"I couldn't beg," Mr Hamdan said. "I had to work."