A federal judge has upheld the Guantánamo detention of a one-legged Yemeni fighter whom the U.S. government said trained with al Qaeda and then holed up in an Afghan hospital in a bloody standoff early in the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan.

Adham Mohammed Ali Awad, 27, was among the first war-on-terror captives brought to Camp X-Ray at the remote U.S. detention center in southeast Cuba.

On Aug. 12, U.S. District Judge James Robertson issued a classified decision in Washington, D.C., that denied Awad's bid to be freed through a habeas corpus petition.

It was the first victory for the Obama administration in its effort to defend some Guantánamo detentions as lawful after two other judges ordered a Kuwaiti and Afghan set free in separate July 29 rulings.

In one high-profile case, Judge Ellen Segal Huvelle ordered the U.S. government to send home Mohammed Jawad, once accused of a war crime. His lawyers say he was captured at age 14. Both Jawad and the Kuwaiti, Khalid Mutairi, 34, are still at Guantánamo.

The Awad ruling was the sixth at the federal court that agreed with the Defense Department on a Guantánamo captive's detention. Others have included a Yemeni who served as a cook for the Taliban and a Tunisian al Qaeda trainee.

In contrast, judges have ordered 28 detainees transferred from Guantánamo as unlawfully detained, as the court works its way through about 200 Guantánamo habeas cases now at various pre-trial stages.

In some cases, judges have postponed hearings while an Obama administration task force decides whether to continue imprisoning some of the men. In others, defense lawyers have sought delays while they seek documents and evidence they believe could help their clients' cases.

In the case of Awad, the government said U.S. forces and their Afghan allies captured him, already wounded, in a gun battle that ended a seven-week standoff at the Mir Wais hospital in Kandahar province in late January 2002.

News accounts at the time described a harrowing assault involving U.S. Special Forces that left five al Qaeda fighters dead in the two-story hospital. There, Arabs had amassed explosives to resist the U.S. invasion aimed at routing al Qaeda and toppling the Taliban.

Awad was at the hospital at the time of the siege. He apparently lost his leg in what he described as a crash of cars trying to flee 2001 U.S. air strikes on Afghanistan after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Pentagon documents say that Awad admitted to U.S. interrogators that he had traveled from Yemen to Afghanistan to train with al Qaeda before 9/11, but did not know about the attack until afterwards.

The documents also say that Awad was born in Yemen's port city of Aden, site of the October 2000 al Qaeda suicide bombing of the American destroyer USS Cole that killed 17 U.S. sailors.