The Pentagon has released a Kenyan prisoner who was held at Guantánamo Bay for nearly 18 years on suspicion he was tied to an affiliate of Al Qaeda that plotted attacks against Israeli tourists in East Africa two decades ago.
The prisoner, Mohammed Abdul Malik Bajabu, 51, was never charged with a crime.
He was repatriated to the custody of Kenya on Tuesday, three years after a task force of U.S. intelligence officials approved his transfer. The board described him as a well-behaved detainee from a defunct extremist network, Al Qaeda of East Africa.
It was the first release from the wartime prison in more than a year. The Defense Department said it notified Congress last month that it had reached an agreement for Mr. Bajabu’s repatriation.
The prison housed 40 men when President Biden took office with the goal of reviving the Obama administration’s effort to close it through transfers to other countries. There are now 29 detainees, including 11 who have been charged with crimes or convicted.
The 10 men who were previously released by the Biden administration were all sent to their home countries with the exception of Majid Khan, a citizen of Pakistan who attended high school in Maryland. Mr. Khan, a confessed former courier for Al Qaeda who became a U.S. government cooperator, was captured in Pakistan in 2003 and released by the United States in 2023 under a deal that reunited him with his wife and adult daughter in Belize.
President Donald J. Trump released just one prisoner during his tenure, a Saudi who was sent to his homeland to serve a military commissions sentence.
In approving the transfer of Mr. Bajabu, the U.S. Periodic Review Board noted that the prisoner’s family and nongovernmental organizations would help support him. The board also said he was “a low-level extremist trainee before his capture.”
Mark Maher, a lawyer, told the board in 2021 that Mr. Bajabu had two sisters living in Kenya and a wife and children living in Somalia, who would move to Kenya to be reunited with him.
Mr. Maher represented Mr. Bajabu for the London-based human rights group Reprieve, which has helped former detainees through its Life After Guantánamo project. He said Mr. Bajabu was “among the most compliant detainees” at Guantánamo Bay because of his “devotion to peace and healing,” and literacy in the works of Mohandas K. Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.
Mr. Bajabu was among the last of about 780 prisoners the George W. Bush administration brought to Guantánamo Bay in the years after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 — and was one of a few prisoners who were held for ties to an East African terrorist organization.
He was arrested by the Kenyan authorities in February 2007 and turned over to U.S. custody a few weeks later.
A 2015 intelligence profile of Mr. Bajabu said he left Kenya for Somalia in 1996 and was linked to two terrorist attacks that targeted Israelis on Nov. 28, 2002, in Mombasa. A car-bombing that day of the Israeli-owned Paradise Hotel killed 13 people, mostly Kenyans, around the same time an unsuccessful surface-to-air missile attack targeted an Israeli Arkia airliner carrying 271 passengers near Mombasa’s airport.
During the Obama administration, Lee Wolosky, the State Department’s special envoy for Guantánamo closure at the time, discussed with Israeli officials whether, if transferred to Israel, that country would be able to prosecute Mr. Bajabu, according to a former official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the topic involved sensitive diplomacy. Israel never accepted the offer.
