Lawyers for Omar Khadr, the 21-year-old Toronto-born man detained at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, will release on Tuesday morning video footage of his interrogation there by agents of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service.

Five formerly classified DVDs, to be released Tuesday, show CSIS questioning Khadr, then 16, at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, where he has spent the past six years.

The footage consists of 7.5 hours of interrogations by Canadian officials over four days in February 2003, Kadr's lawyer Nathan Whitling said in a statement.

The DVD collection will be made available to the public by Khadr's lawyers in Edmonton at 1 p.m. ET. But because of the size of the material they also will provide a web posting of a 10-minute "highlight reel" that will be available to the public at 5 a.m. ET, Whitling said.

The footage, which have been described by Whitling as "extremely poor" in video and audio quality, show Khadr being asked what he knows of al-Qaeda operatives and about his Islamic faith. At several moments, Khadr, who was raised in a fundamentalist Islamic milieu that included his father's al-Qaeda acquaintances, breaks down and begins crying.

The release of the videos by Khadr's defence team will be a source of potential embarrassment for CSIS and the Canadian government.

CSIS and the Foreign Affairs Ministry were granted special permission by the U.S. Defence Department to question Khadr after he was brought to Guantanamo Bay following his capture in Afghanistan. But the resulting video footage shot by U.S. government agents was never intended for public viewing.

The DVDs are being 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.