5 Guantanamo inmates to go free

2005-09-18 13:01

Kuwait City - The United States has agreed to release five of the 11 Kuwaitis imprisoned at its camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the head of an inmate support group said on Sunday.

"Talks between the US and Kuwaiti governments have almost been completed to release five of the prisoners," said Khalid al-Ouda, the head of the society of families of Kuwaiti prisoners in Guantanamo.

"The US has agreed to return them to Kuwait but no timeline has been set. We are optimistic this will take place after a month or so," he told AFP.

The United States in January handed over Nasser Najr al-Mutairi, who spent three years in Guantanamo.

He was tried by a Kuwaiti court which in June cleared him of charges of undermining Kuwait's national interests by committing an act of aggression against a foreign nation.

Ouda said six Kuwaiti prisoners have joined a hunger strike being staged by some 200 inmates to protest at their conditions and prolonged confinement without trial.

"Two of the six, Abdulaziz al-Shimmari and Fawzi al-Ouda, have been hospitalised after their health deteriorated for refusing to take food for five weeks," said Ouda, citing US lawyers who visited them.

"The lawyers told me the two were skin and bones and Shimmari could not walk ... The remaining four are not in good health condition."

According to Thomas Wilmer, the US lawyer defending the Kuwaitis, most of them were captured by bounty-hunters in 2001 near the Afghanistan-Pakistan border and sold to the United States.

The New York Times reported Sunday that as many as 200 prisoners - more than a third of the camp's population - have refused food in recent weeks, while camp officials put the number at 105.

- SAPA