A confessed al Qaida cook serving a two-year terrorism sentence will not automatically go home to his native Sudan in July 2012 when his punishment ends, a Pentagon spokeswoman said Monday.

Ibrahim al Qosi, 50, pleaded guilty to providing material support for terrorism in July. A military jury sentenced him to 14 more years at Guantánamo, unaware that a senior Pentagon official agreed to cap Qosi’s prison term at two years.

He is now segregated in a cellblock of the prison camps here reserved for war criminals.

“Decisions regarding Mr. al Qosi’s status after he serves his punitive confinement will be made by the detention authorities at that time,” Army Lt. Col. Tanya Bradsher said.

She called the sentence due to expire July 7, 2012 “being punished for past acts.” After that, he could still be subject to “detention under the law of war” as “a belligerent during an armed conflict.”

Bradsher responded to a specific query from The Miami Herald about the endgame in the Qosi case on the eve of the first military commissions hearing here of 2011. War court sources said another long-held Sudanese captive would plead guilty to war crimes in exchange for a short sentence: Noor Uthman Mohammed, in his 40s, who allegedly was a weapons instructor and some-time manager of the Khaldan terror training camp along the tribal frontier border between Afghan-Pakistan.

Pakistani security forces, working with the CIA, captured the man, known as Noor in a March 28, 2002 raid on a safe house that netted the United States its first so-called “high-value detainee” after the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks -- Zayn Abdeen al Hussain, better known as Abu Zubaydah

Little had been known about Noor, whose attorney said he traveled to Afghanistan long before 9/11 for weapons training and to deepen his faith. He is the last captive currently charged under the military commissions system that Barack Obama decried as a senator and reformed as a president.

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