An appeals court on Friday overturned a judge's order for the release of a Guantanamo Bay detainee accused of helping al-Qaida recruit two men who became Sept. 11 hijackers.

A lower court judge had ruled Mohamedou Ould Salahi should be freed after eight years at Guantanamo because he was abused by interrogators at the U.S. military prison in Cuba and that tainted the evidence against him. Other classified information was insufficient to support a criminal prosecution, the judge ruled.

Salahi, now 40 years old, later retracted his confession to persuading the two men to travel to Afghanistan to train for jihad.

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia rejected the Obama administration's request to order Salahi's continued detention. But the judges unanimously agreed the lower court must reconsider the case, given new legal opinions in other Guantanamo lawsuits.