Authorities on Monday interrogated six soldiers suspected of taking part in an attempted coup, a day after armed men busted into the president's home and sprayed it with bullets.

President Joao Bernardo Vieira narrowly escaped by hiding in a room in his heavily fortified residence while security forces fought back, only managing to turn back the soldiers after a three-hour gunbattle.

On Monday, the president of the tiny West African country returned to work, meeting with diplomats and overseeing the creation of a commission that will investigate the attempted coup, an Interior Ministry spokesman said.

Col. Armando Nhaga confirmed that the arrested six soldiers were being questioned. Three others fled after the battle.

He said that among those still at large is Ntcham Yala, a navy sergeant who is believed to be close to the ousted head of the navy, Rear Adm. Bubo Na Tchuto.

Na Tchuto was placed under house arrest in August after being accused of attempting to orchestrate a coup. But he escaped six days later, fleeing by sea to neighboring Gambia, where he was briefly arrested and then released, Nhaga said.

Na Tchuto could not be located for comment Monday but he has previously denied involvement in the prior foiled coup.

The U.N. says Guinea-Bissau is a key transit point for cocaine smuggled from Latin America to Europe. The government estimates that as much as 1,750 pounds of cocaine transits the country's borders each week, most of it flown in small planes from South America.

U.N. drug officials believe the traffickers drop off the drugs on the uninhabited islands that dot the country's coastline. It's a territory that until August was under the control of Na Tchuto's navy.

Sunday's attack came days after the government announced the provisional results of last week's parliamentary elections, which saw the party of former President Kumba Yala lose a fifth of its delegates. Yala rejected the results even though international observers deemed them legitimate.

Since winning independence from Portugal in 1973, Guinea-Bissau has suffered multiple coups and a civil war. Vieira himself came to power in a 1980 coup, while Kumba Yala was deposed in one in 2003.

The nation remains one of the poorest and least developed in the world with most of its 1.5 million residents living without electricity. Even the nation's newly built parliament is powered by a generator.

A Tunisian court on Monday convicted an alleged former logistics head of al-Qaida's European operations of belonging to a terrorist group abroad and sentenced him to 11 years in prison, a defense lawyer said.

Sami Ben Khemais, 40, had denied charges he belonged to two little-known terrorist groups in Afghanistan and Italy, defense lawyer Sami Ben Amor said. Ben Khemais was extradited to his homeland from Italy in June.

The lawyer said he had asked the military court to throw out the case, arguing that the United Nations, the United States, Canada and the European Union have not listed the two groups as terrorist organizations.

Ben Khemais was returned to Tunisia facing 100 years in sentences from trials conducted in absentia. Another court will try him soon on other terrorism charges that could bring an extra 15 years in penalties.

Ben Khemais had spent the last six years in prison in Italy. In 2002 - in the first al-Qaida-related guilty verdict after the Sept. 11 attacks - he was among seven Tunisians convicted by a Milan, Italy, court on charges of helping recruits for Osama bin Laden's network obtain fake identity papers.

The U.S.-based advocacy group Human Rights Watch had criticized Italy's decision to extradite Ben Khemais, arguing Italy acted before the European Court of Human Rights could review his claim that he could face mistreatment in Tunisian custody.

Ben Amor said his client had not made any claims of torture or inhuman treatment during his incarceration in Tunisia.

Former Osama bin Laden driver Salim Hamdan is being transferred from the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, back to his home country of Yemen, a senior defense official said.

Hamdan was convicted of aiding al-Qaida in August and sentenced to 5 1/2 years in prison. He would be eligible for release in January with credit for time served.

The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the matter, said Monday that Hamdan will serve out the remainder of his sentence in Yemen.

Waleed Alshahari, who ovesees Guantanamo Bay issues for the Yemen Embassy in Washington, said he was surprised to learn plans for Hamdan's release because there have been no new negotiation on the release of the 90 or so Yemeni detainees at the prison.

He said any deal over their release likely will come under President-elect Barack Obama's administration.

"It seems the new administration wants to close this prison, so so there will be negotiations with them," he said. Security has been a roadblock. The U.S. is concerned the detainees will be released as soon as they are returned to Yemen. Yemeni and U.S. officials agree there should be a new, secure rehabilitation center built in Yemen but officials there say they can't afford it and have asked the U.S. to build it.

Alshahari said he believes the Obama administration will seek a deal with a neighboring country to help pay for the project.

Charles Swift, one of Hamdan's defense lawyers, told The Washington Post: "Certainly the fair thing to do is to return him. If you don't, you really come to the absolute thing of the commissions becoming a complete sham."

A jury of six U.S. military officers sentenced Hamdan at Guantanamo's first war-crimes trial earlier this year, and at the time he had already served five years and a month at the Cuba facility.

Pentagon officials had suggested all along that they could hold the 40-year-old Guantanamo prisoner indefinitely regardless of the sentence. The Pentagon reserves the right to hold him and other "enemy combatants" who are considered dangerous to the United States, even those who are acquitted or complete sentences in the tribunal system.

Guantanamo prosecutors had sought a sentence of 30 years to life for Hamdan, whose trial inaugurated the special commission system in July. They also had argued that as an "enemy combatant" he should not receive credit for his time detained there. A military judge rejected that argument.

While convicted of supporting terrorism, Hamdan was acquitted by a jury of military officers of providing missiles to al-Qaida and knowing his work would be used for terrorism. He was cleared of being part of al-Qaida's conspiracy to attack the United States.

He could have faced up to life in prison and his relatively light sentence was considered a rebuke to military prosecutors who portrayed him as a hardened al-Qaida warrior.

Two German citizens suspected of distributing propaganda over the Internet supporting al-Qaida and other terrorist organizations were arrested Tuesday, German prosecutors said.

The men - identified only as Daniel P., 26 and Harun Can A., 23 - were among eight suspects whose homes were raided on Tuesday, federal prosecutors said in a statement.

A 19-year-old German citizen identified as Irfan P. was already in custody on separate charges before the morning raids in cities including Augsburg, Duesseldorf and Bremen, where investigators combed through the suspects' computer equipment.

Prosecutors said the three Germans are accused of belonging to the Global Islamic Media Front and of supporting a foreign terrorist organization.

"The suspects are, among other things, strongly suspected of being responsible for many German-language Internet sites," the statement said, "Through them (the suspects) supported and solicited members and supporters for al-Qaida, al-Qaida in Iraq and Ansar Al Islam."

According to prosecutors, the men posted propaganda videos and messages to the group's German-language site and created links to other sites hosted by Islamic terrorist groups.

Federal prosecutor's spokesman Frank Wallenta said two of the videos included a German speaker calling for Germany and Austria to pull their troops out of Afghanistan.

Daniel P. is accused of 18 counts of publishing propaganda to the sites between November 2006 and November 2007. Irfan P. faces 10 counts of the same charge and Harun Can A. faces four.

Wallenta said he could not estimate the maximum prison sentence that each suspect might face because a judge will need to decide which charges they will face and whether to hold them in investigative custody, which could reduce their sentence if convicted.

"It's much to early for that," Wallenta said.

He declined to provide the names of the suspects' lawyers.

In March, an Austrian man who acknowledged participating in the Global Islamic Media Front was convicted together with his wife of making terror threats on targets in Germany and Austria.

The man, identified only as Mohamed M., disputed that the group had ties to al-Qaida. He was sentenced to four years in prison.

Irfan P. was already in investigative custody in Germany on multiple charges, including one that he translated into German statements made by Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, the self-styled head of the al-Qaida front group the Islamic State of Iraq.

The U.S. has described al-Baghdadi as a fictitious character used to give an Iraqi face to an organization dominated by foreign al-Qaida fighters.

Daniel P. and Harun Can A. are scheduled to appear Wednesday in federal court, where a judge will decide whether to keep them in investigative custody. Irfan P. will face the same hearing Thursday.