One of Guantánamo Bay’s most notorious snitches, an Egyptian who won rare accolades from US military officers for his compliance, has been transferred to Bosnia, along with a Yemeni sent to Montenegro.

The two transfers, which occurred early on Wednesday morning, are expected to be the last to occur in January – one shy of the Obama administration’s goal of sending 17 men out of the detention facility after another detainee unexpectedly declined his resettlement offer.

The transfers of Tariq el-Sawah, the Egyptian detainee, and Yemeni Abdul Aziz al-Swidi, bring the detainee population at Guantánamo down to 91 people.

A January 2010 internal administration review cleared Swidi for transfer, although he was kept in Guantánamo because of the Obama administration’s self-imposed ban on resettling detainees in war-torn Yemen, along with a clutch of bureaucratic and congressional opposition.

The Egyptian Sawah was cleared by a quasi-parole board in February 2015 – which called him “one of the most compliant detainees at Guantánamo” – but his story is unusual. He has long provided so much information to intelligence officers and detention-facility officials about terrorism broadly and other detainees specifically that he has been allowed almost unprecedented privileges at Guantánamo.

He has been allowed not only to live in what one US official called a “studio” in Camp Echo. He was allowed to garden, paint watercolors, watch satellite television and even enjoy a mini-refrigerator. According to a 2010 Washington Post profile, Sawah shared his garden with another detainee, Mohamedou Ould Slahi, whose Guantánamo memoirs have become international bestsellers.

While other detainees starve themselves to protest at their treatment by the US, Sawah has grown morbidly obese during more than 13 years in Guantánamo, leading to persistent ill health.

“They fattened him up with cheeseburgers. He weighs like 400 pounds,” said a knowledgeable US official.

Egypt, known to torture prisoners, had wanted Sawah back: its first elected president, a Muslim Brotherhood member since deposed in a military coup, formally requested Sawah in 2012.

A former Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood member himself, Sawah traveled to Bosnia, where he began a life of militancy, and later Afghanistan, where he was captured. A suspected explosives expert for al-Qaida, the US once wanted to charge him in the military commissions with material support for terrorism, which, after a court dispute, is no longer a valid charge.

Yet Sawah is said to have grown disillusioned with terrorism, and to have transformed to the point of becoming an atheist. Thanks both to his compliance and his reputed informing on other detainees, he is perhaps the only detainee to receive letters of recommendation from the joint taskforce that runs Guantánamo.

Unusually, much of the transcript of Sawah’s quasi-parole board hearing, known as a Periodic Review Board, remain undisclosed, said by the board to be at the “request of the detainee”.

On Thursday, Sawah left Guantánamo to return to Bosnia, where he first learned militancy, where he has a daughter and ex-wife waiting. He is expected to go free.

The second detainee, Swidi, will also go to the Balkans, in what is the first ever resettlement of a Guantánamo detainee in Montenegro. Once thought to be an explosives trainer in Afghanistan for Osama bin Laden, the Yemeni has, since 2010, been considered to pose a negligible threat to the US and “has always asked his attorneys to pursue any educational opportunities open to him”, said his lawyer, Erin Thomas.

Thomas said Swidi is fluent in English and enrolled in two college-level courses at Guantánamo, in math and in English composition.

“His singular focus has been preparing for a future life outside of Guantánamo,” said Thomas.

As Barack Obama refines what is likely to be his final plan for closing Guantánamo before leaving office, there are still a further 34 detainees approved for transfer and awaiting resettlement.

That number has remained static despite the two Wednesday transfers, as this week the quasi-parole board for Guantánamo detainees disclosed it had cleared two so-called “forever prisoners”. There are now 47 of those men, said to be dangerous but without sufficient evidence to charge.

It is thought likely that Obama’s final plan would propose that the “forever prisoners” move to the United States, despite congressional opposition.

While Obama’s longtime plan has been to transfer out as many detained men as his administration considers a marginal danger, an effort to energize that plan by transferring 17 men by late January hit a snag when one of them, the Yemeni Mohammed Bawazir, abruptly refused to be resettled.

Bawazir, a 35-year-old Yemeni whom both the Bush and Obama administrations approved for transfer, had traveled to Afghanistan as part of a “charitable organization”, according to his lawyer, John Chandler, and sold to the US for $5,000 by the allied warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum, now Afghanistan’s vice-president. A former longtime hunger striker whose forced feeding became an issue in federal court after Bawazir likened it to torture, Bawazir currently weighs about 130 pounds, after dropping as low as 90.

But despite a 14-year captivity at Guantánamo, Bawazir rejected going to a country that agreed to take him because it meant not being able to be with his family. As recently as Friday, Chandler said, Bawazir, who is described as “mercurial” and fearing the unknown, had agreed to go there.

Neither US officials nor Bawazir’s lawyer would identify the country, claiming that doing so could jeopardize the country’s willingness to take subsequent Guantánamo detainees.

“It’s a country you and I would be very happy to go have a beer in,” Chandler said.

The Pentagon’s detentions spokesman, Navy Commander Gary Ross, confirmed that Bawazir had declined his resettlement and said he remains approved for transfer.

The lawyer said he was disappointed that his client had declined the resettlement offer, not knowing what the future held for Bawazir.

“I told him it was my view after all the work they did to land him a really good spot that he was likely to be there when the Obama administration leaves office next year, and God knows what’s going to happen then,” Chandler told the Guardian.



