Qosi’s case was more straightforward.

Pakistani forces captured Qosi in December 2001, fleeing the U.S. assault on al Qaida at Tora Bora. He was in a pack of Arab men suspected of being Bin Laden’s bodyguards. Qosi was turned over to U.S. forces in Afghanistan, who shipped him to Guantánamo when the Pentagon opened Camp X-Ray a month later.

His native Sudan had been seeking his release for years — and had already successfully resettled nine former Sudanese captives, all of them released through Bush administration’s downsizing efforts.

Then, in July 2010, Qosi sealed a secret deal to plead guilty to providing material support for terrorism in exchange for a two-year prison sentence. A military jury that summer deliberated a for-the-record punishment and returned a symbolic 14-year term. But a side deal under seal on the Military Commissions docket cut that sentence to two years of confinement as a war criminal.

His return to his homeland ends more than two decades of association with al Qaida from its earliest inception in Sudan and training camps in Afghanistan.

Qosi, a trained accountant, kept the books for a bin Laden business in Khartoum in the early ’90s, according to Pentagon documents made public by WikiLeaks. He then followed Bin Laden to Afghanistan in 1996. Because the timeline for war crimes only covers the era in Afghanistan, Qosi pleaded guilty to foot-soldier crimes — sometimes driving for Bin Laden, working at al Qaida’s Star of Jihad compound in Jalalabad, and fleeing the post-Sept. 11 U.S. invasion to Tora Bora, armed with an AK-47 rifle.

He was also one of the first to formally allege torture — the use of strobe lights, sleep deprivation, sexual humiliation, being wrapped in the Israeli flag — in an unlawful detention petition his Air Force attorney filed in federal court in 2004. It was never heard. Instead, he withdrew the habeas corpus suit as part of his 2010 plea agreement.

Once Qosi completes a re-entry program in Khartoum, according to documents filed at the war court last year, he was planning to settle in his native Atbara, a town 150 miles to the north, to help run a family shop. His wife moved there from her native Morocco last year to await him with their two daughters.

Among those captured with Qosi in December 2001 was his wife’s father, Abdullah Tabarak, a Moroccan identified in leaked Defense Department documents as Bin Laden’s chief bodyguard. Tabarak was inexplicably transferred elsewhere from Guantánamo in July 2003.

Qosi’s wife is Mariam al Bashir, Tabarak’s daughter. They wed in Afghanistan before the Sept. 11 attacks.

“He is an intelligent, pious, humble and sincere individual who has endured much hardship the past 10 years,” said Reichler. “But he returns home without hatred or rancor.”

At Guantánamo, Qosi had acquired a small personal library of books provided by his lawyers that included Obama’s Audacity of Hope and Bush’s Decision Points. It was not immediately known if he was allowed to take the presidents’ memoirs with him to Sudan.