The first Guantanamo Bay inmate convicted of terror charges by a U.S. military court returned to Australia on Sunday to serve out his sentence in a maximum security prison, police said. A government-chartered executive jet bringing David Hicks from the U.S. 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.Under a deal with U.S. 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 U.S. 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. 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.
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 U.S. gag order can be legally enforced. Australia's only other Guantanamo inmate, Mamdouh Habib, was released without charge and returned home in January 2005.