Guantanamo teen granted bail after 13 years in prison

A relaxed and smiling Omar Khadr said freedom was way better than he thought and said he wanted a fresh start.

Khadr was released on bail after a judge refused a last-ditch attempt by the Canadian government to keep him imprisoned.

Toronto-born Khadr spent 10 years in the US prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Since 2012 he has been held in Canada, serving out an eight-year sentence handed down by a US military commission in 2010.

He was convicted of war crimes, including throwing a grenade when he was 15 that killed US Army sergeant Christopher Speer in Afghanistan during a 2002 firefight.

Khadr, now 28, was once the youngest detainee at Guantanamo.

"Give me a chance to see who I am as a person, not as a name," he said outside his lawyer's home in Edmonton, Alberta. "I'll prove to them that I'm a good person."

Defense lawyers said Khadr was a child soldier who was pushed into war by his father, Ahmed Said Khadr, an alleged senior al Qaida financier whose family stayed with Osama bin Laden briefly when Omar was a boy. His Egyptian-born father was killed in 2003 in a Pakistani military operation.

Khadr, articulate and showing no bitterness, said he believed in education and was excited to start his life.

Asked what he had to say to Americans, Khadr said: "I'm sorry for the pain I've caused for the families of the victims. There's nothing I can do about the past but I can do something about the future."

Khadr said he would disappoint Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper, whose government has long refused to do anything for him while he was at Guantanamo and has tried to keep him in prison in Canada.

"I'm better than the person he thinks I am," Khadr said.

Khadr was the last Western detainee at Guantanamo. Asked if he categorically rejects violent jihad, he said "Yes, yes I do."