Australian Qaeda supporter home from Guantanamo

ADELAIDE, May 20 (Reuters) The first Guantanamo Bay inmate convicted of terror charges by a US military court returned to Australia today to serve out his sentence in a maximum security prison, police said.

A government-chartered executive jet bringing David Hicks from the US prison in Cuba landed at an air force base in the suburbs of his Adelaide home, eight years after Hicks left for Pakistan.

With Hicks were Australian Federal Police agents, his Australian lawyer David McLeod and prison guards from Adelaide's Yatala Prison, where he will serve out his sentence.

''If people train with terrorist organisations, and that training to learn how to attack civilian populations ... we regard them as very serious issues,'' Australia's Attorney-General Philip Ruddock said on television.

Hicks, 31, was captured in Afghanistan in late 2001 and spent five years in Guantanamo Bay before he was sentenced in March to seven years in jail after he pleaded guilty to providing material support to a listed terrorist organisation.

Under a deal with US prosecutors, most of his jail term was suspended and Hicks will be able to walk free from prison before January 1, 2008.

Hicks was the first person convicted by a US war crimes tribunal since World War Two and was the first of hundreds of foreign captives, held at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp in Cuba, to face a military trial.

His return ends more than five years of campaigning from his family and a growing band of supporters in Australia, who pressured the government to use its influence in Washington to speed up Hicks's trial.

Hicks will complete his sentence under a prisoner exchange agreement between Australia and the United states.

He will be placed in the high-security G-division at Yatala, alongside Australia's worst serial killers, a gang of four who murdered 11 people and disposed of several bodies in barrels hidden in a disused bank vault.

He will have little or no contact with other prisoners and all of his telephone conversations will be monitored. He will be allowed to meet his lawyers, but all other visits will be strictly controlled and will be limited to non-contact visits.

TRAINED WITH AL QAEDA At his trial, Hicks acknowledged he had trained with the al Qaeda militant network, fought US allies in Afghanistan in late 2001 for two hours, and then sold his gun to raise cab fare and tried to flee to neighbouring Pakistan by taxi.

Hicks admitted he conducted surveillance of the US Embassy in Kabul, more than a decade after it closed, as an al Qaeda training exercise.

He also acknowledged he met al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, the accused mastermind of the September. 11 attacks on the United States, and asked him why there were no training manuals in English.

But he denied any advance knowledge of the attacks.

His military lawyer, Major Michael Mori, portrayed Hicks as an apologetic soldier wannabe who never shot at anyone and ran away when he got a taste of battle, but prosecutors said Hicks freely joined a band of killers who slaughtered innocent people.

As part of his sentence, Hicks will be banned from speaking to the media for a year after his March conviction, although Australia raised doubts over whether the US gag order can be legally enforced.

Australia's only other Guantanamo inmate, Mamdouh Habib, was released without charge and returned home in January 2005.

REUTERS KK PM0810