ST..JOHNS (CBC) - Video footage of Canadian detainee Omar Khadr being interrogated by Canadian Security Intelligence Service agents at the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was released early Tuesday morning by his lawyers.

The five formerly classified DVDs consist of 7.5 hours of questioning by Canadian officials over a three-day period in February 2003. Khadr, now 21, was 16 years old at the time he was interrogated, about six months after his capture in Afghanistan.

A compilation of excerpts approximately 10 minutes in length was posted on the internet just after 5 a.m. ET. Disc copies of the 5-DVD collection were to be made available to the media at 1 p.m. ET at the lawyers' offices in Edmonton.

The footage shows Khadr being asked what he knows about al-Qaeda operatives and questioned about his Islamic faith. Several times, Khadr breaks down and begins crying.

He also displays wounds to his Canadian interrogators.

The U.S. Defence Department granted special permission to CSIS and the Foreign Affairs Ministry to question Khadr after he was brought to Guantanamo Bay, where he is still being held on charges he killed a U.S. soldier during a firefight in Afghanistan.

The sessions were videotaped by U.S. government agents. The footage is poor in video and audio quality since it was never meant to be seen by the public, said Khadr's lawyer, Nathan Whitling.

Michel Juneau-Katsuya, a former CSIS agent, told CBC that the unprecedented release of the interrogation tapes is likely to put a damper on Canada's relationship with the U.S. - at least in the short term.

"Anybody can logically sort of assume that the Americans will be a little bit more cautious about what they give to us or or in the context they give it to us, the Canadian authorities," he said Monday.

The videos mark the first opportunity for the outside world to witness a detainee being interrogated at Guantanamo.

The DVDs were made public under a court order obtained by Khadr's lawyers.

In May, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that branches of the Canadian government had to hand over key evidence against Khadr to his legal team to allow a full defence of the charges against him, which include accusations by the U.S. that he spied for and provided material support to terrorists.

Several Canadian media organizations then applied for and obtained the release of the DVDs, as well as a package of documents that made headlines last week.

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