January 23, 2002	Wednesday	Ziqa'ad 8, 1422

WASHINGTON, Jan 22: The US military has moved American Taliban fighter John Walker Lindh from a warship in the Indian Ocean to Kandahar, from where he will be flown quickly to the United States to face trial, a US defense official said on Tuesday.

“He could be in country (the United States) within a day or two,” the official said.

The Defense Department refused to comment on Walker’s whereabouts as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld prepared on Tuesday to hold the latest in a series of Pentagon briefings for reporters on the US military operation in Afghanistan.

Walker, who had been held aboard the US warship Bataan in the Arabian Sea, has been indicted in the United States on charges of conspiring to kill US nationals in Afghanistan and with providing support to the Al Qaeda.

The 20-year-old Californian currently faces trial in US District Court in Alexandria, Virginia, but it was not immediately clear where he would arrive in the United States. The military will turn him over to the Justice Department.

HUNDREDS OF OTHERS HELD: The case has drawn attention in the United States as people debate whether Walker was a traitor. Walker’s parents, Frank Lindh and Marilyn Walker, have portrayed their son, who converted to Islam at the age of 16, as a misguided idealist rather than a Muslim extremist.

The military was holding 275 Al Qaeda and Taliban “detainees” in Afghanistan and another 158 at the US Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where they have been transferred this month.

Only Walker has been charged, but a number of the others could face military trials authorized by President George W. Bush in the wake of the Sept 11 attacks.

In one training camp in Afghanistan in June, Walker learned from one of his instructors that Osama had sent people to the United States to carry out several suicide operations, according to the affidavit signed by FBI agent Anne Asbury.—Reuters