WASHINGTON — John Walker Lindh has been sent to the United States aboard a military plane and under high security to face charges he conspired with terrorists to kill fellow Americans.
Meanwhile, six anti-Taliban militiamen have been brought to Walter Reed Army Medical Center for treatment of injuries they got when an American bomb went astray last month, a defense official said Wednesday, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Taliban fighter Lindh was taken off the USS Bataan warship in the Arabian Sea by helicopter and transferred to another military plane at the airport at the southern Afghan city of Kandahar, officials said. They also spoke on condition of anonymity.
The Pentagon officially was not confirming the transfer, saying it would be dangerous to release any information about his movements. And journalists were kept away from the area at Kandahar where Lindh boarded the plane.
Another official said Wednesday that Lindh was moved in restraints but gave no details.
Lindh was expected to arrive in suburban Washington — where he will be tried in federal court — sometime Wednesday.
The 20-year-old Californian converted to Islam four years ago and took up the cause of Muslim radicals, fighting alongside the Taliban in Afghanistan and even meeting with Osama bin Laden at an al-Qaida terrorist training camp, his federal indictment says.
Held by the military since shortly after his capture in Afghanistan, Lindh was turned over to the U.S. Justice Department on Tuesday and will not be sent to the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, base where other prisoners from the Afghan conflict are being held.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Lindh would be brought into the federal courts' Northern District of Virginia, which covers the Pentagon and most of Washington's Virginia suburbs. Rumsfeld's comment came during an hourlong news conference he devoted largely to defending U.S. treatment of foreign fighters held in Afghanistan and at Guantanamo Naval Base.
"The concern that the Department of Defense has had . . . has been to do everything humanely possible to stop terrorists from killing people and to gather as much intelligence information as we can," he said. "And that is pure, simple self-defense of the United States of America."
Rumsfeld said repeatedly that the prisoners were being treated humanely and in accordance with international rules.
"These people are committed terrorists," Rumsfeld said of the prisoners, mostly suspected al-Qaida fighters flown to Cuba after being captured in Afghanistan.
"We are keeping them off the street and out of the airlines and out of nuclear power plants and out of ports across this country and across other countries, and it seems to me a perfectly reasonable thing to do."
Lindh was coming to the United States because he is an American. President Bush's order allowing terrorism suspects to be tried by military tribunals does not apply to U.S. citizens.
Lindh's indictment alleges he trained at an al-Qaida camp in Afghanistan. He was captured in November in the siege of Kunduz and survived a prison uprising near Mazar-e-Sharif.
The conspiracy charge against him can carry a life sentence.
Meanwhile, the Afghan fighters brought to the states for treatment were among dozens of casualties in a "friendly fire" incident Dec. 5 near the southern Afghan city of Kandahar.