Washington  - As the military tribunals at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, resumed for the first time under the Obama administration Monday, a Canadian detainee sought to dismiss his team of lawyers amid an ensuing row over who would defend him.

The detainee in question was Omar Khadr, 22, a Canadian citizen accused of killing a US soldier in Afghanistan in 2002. Khadr was just 15 years old at the time.

Hours after taking office in January, President Barack Obama ordered prosecutors to seek delays in all of the proceedings at Guantanamo so his administration could review the cases and explore the best way for moving forward. The cases were frozen for 120 days.

In January, a US military judge suspended the proceedings against Khadr, a so-called "child soldier" suspected of using a hand grenade to kill the American soldier.

Monday's hearings was beset by arguments over who would defend Khadr. "Right now, nobody," Khadr told the judge, when asked who on his team of Pentagon-appointed lawyers should speak for him.

"I can't trust these (American) lawyers. They've been accusing each other for the past four months, and fighting in front of me," the Miami Herald quoted Khadr as saying, as he asked for all of them to be dismissed.

"I'm going to ask my Canadian lawyers to choose someone to represent me who I can trust," he said. The judge has given him until July 13 to consult his family's lawyers in Canada.

Obama has stated he intends to close Guantanamo, where about 245 prisoners remain locked up and only 22 have been charged with crimes, by 2010.

But the closure poses complicated problems, including the question of which other countries will take in the prisoners as resistance grows inside the US against having them in local prisons or communities.

Omar Khadr's father, Ahmed Said Khadr, was an alleged al-Qaeda financier and close friend of terrorist leader Osama bin Laden. He took his three sons to Afghanistan, apparently to suport al-Qaeda, and was killed in fighting with Pakistani security forces in 2003.

Khadr's one brother, Abdullah Abdurahman, was injured in the same fighting but was eventually transferred to Canada, where he awaits extradition to the United States to face multiple terrorism charges.

His other, middle brother, Abdurahman Khadr, was also a prisoner at Guantanamo, but was later freed and is the only one to have publicly denounced jihad.

Under former president George W Bush, the prison at the US naval base in a remote location of Cuba was established for holding detainees in the war on terrorism, but the facility was quickly the subject of accusations of abusive interrogation tactics or even torture. Up to
800 prisoners were processed at Guantanamo, and many have returned to their native or third countries.

Guantanamo became a symbol of excess in Bush's war on terrorism and damaged US credibility in the world. It also became a source of tension between the United States and European Union. (dpa)