Sabar Lal Melma

Subsequently the Department of Defense instituted the Combatant Status Review Tribunals. The Tribunals, however, were not authorized to determine whether the captives were lawful combatants—rather they were merely empowered to make a recommendation as to whether the captive had previously been correctly determined to match the Bush administration's definition of an enemy combatant.

They were authorized to consider whether a detainee should continue to be detained by the United States, because they continued to pose a threat—or whether they could safely be repatriated to the custody of their home country, or whether they could be set free.

Sabar was killed by Afghan and NATO security forces in Kabul, Afghanistan on 9/3/11. As of September 4, 2011 Sabar Lal Melma could no longer be located on the McClatchy Guantanamo Inmate Database.

NATO officials reported that an individual named Sabar Lal Melma was shot dead during a night raid on his home in Jalalabad on September 3, 2011. According to those officials he emerged from his home carrying an AK-47. The officials went on to say Mr. Lal Melma had been organizing attacks and financing al Qaeda operations. However, in a CNN interview with Haji Sahib Rohullah Wakil, a tribal leader who had been captured with Sabar in 2002, Mr. Wakil asserted Lal Melma "chose a civilian life" after his release from Guantanamo.

Ray Riviera, writing in the New York Times on September 4, 2011, reported that Sabar's killing came just two days after coalition forces had promised the Afghanistan High Peace Council that they would quit harassing him. Riviera reported that Sabar had been apprehended by NATO forces as recently as one month earlier. However NATO forces denied both promising to stop harassing Sabar, or that they had recently taken him into custody. Riviera of the New York Times quoted Haji Deen Muhammad of the Peace Council about how the killing of Sabar would affect efforts to get members of the Taliban to defect.

In September of 2011, the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) issued a press release stating they had knowledge that Lal Melma was "in contact with several senior al Qaeda members throughout Kunar and Pakistan"

On June 15, 2008 the McClatchy News Service published articles based on interviews with 66 former Guantanamo captives. McClatchy reporters interviewed Sabar Lal. Sabar Lal said he had been an anti-Taliban fighter during their administration, that he suffered a gunshot wound during his opposition to the Taliban, and that he had helped oust the Taliban during the American invasion.

Sabar Lal Melma was repatriated on September 28, 2007, along with five other Afghans, a Libyan captive and a Yemeni captive.

The Center for Constitutional Rights reports that all of the Afghans repatriated to Afghanistan from April 2007 were sent to Afghan custody in the American built and supervised wing of the Pul-e-Charkhi prison near Kabul.

Sabar Lal Melma was a citizen of Afghanistan who was held in extrajudicial detention in the United States Guantanamo Bay detainment camps, in Cuba. Sabar Lal Melma's Guantanamo Internment Serial Number was 801. American intelligence analysts estimate that Sabar Lal Melma was born in 1962, Darya-e-Pech, Afghanistan.