While al-Walid was in Sudan, where al Qaeda was based in the mid-1990s, he twice asked Slahi to help him get money to his family in Mauritania, about $4,000 in December 1997 and another $4,000 in December 1998. In the 2010 "habeas corpus" opinion for Slahi, the judge wrote: "the government relies on nothing but Slahi's uncorroborated, coerced statements to conclude that the money transfers were done on behalf of and in support of al-Qa'ida." In 1998, Slahi was heard by U.S. intelligence talking to al-Walid on a satellite phone traced to bin Laden.