A jury on Wednesday acquitted the first Guantanamo detainee to stand trial in a civilian court of most charges that he plotted to bomb the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, dpa reported.
The attacks killed 224 people including 12 Americans.
Ahmed Ghailani was found guilty only in conspiring to attack the US embassies and was cleared of nearly a dozen other charges, for which US prosecutors had hoped to put him in prison for the rest of his life.
The verdict was reached more than a week after a 12-member jury was ordered by Judge Lewis Kaplan to go into deliberations in a federal court in Lower Manhattan.
It was the first civilian trial of a Guantanamo detainee, which the Obama administration had hoped would be a test case for other terrorist cases. Military tribunals are the alternative for trying Guantanamo cases, but are slow moving and fraught with controversy.
During the month-longh trial that began in October, US prosecutors accused Ghailani of plotting and helping to organize the attacks on the US embassies.
But Ghailaini's lawyers said the Tanzanian was duped by al- Qaeda terrorist agents at work in eastern Africa with the intention of killing Americans.