Guantanamo: US may free 100
2006-04-20 16:18
Paris - The US is ready to release about 100 detainees from its base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, once their home countries or a third party agree to take them in, a senior US official said on Thursday.
"About 100 prisoners at Guantanamo are ready to leave, once their home countries are ready to receive them," state department official Sandra Hodgkinson told reporters at the US embassy in Paris.
"It takes time to secure an agreement from their countries of origin: we want assurances that they will be treated humanely and also that they will be kept under watch," said Hodgkinson, the deputy head of the state department's war crimes office.
"Where do they go when they are released? In the case of Afghans, for example, do they go back to Afghanistan?
"But President (Hamid) Karzai doesn't want them," she said in comments delivered in French.
Hodgkinson cited the example of 16 Chinese ethnic Uighur Muslims, for whom she said US authorities have been searching for a home for two years.
"We have decided that they can be (released), but no one wants to take them in," she said, adding that Washington refused to send them to China "because they would be tortured there".
Hodgkinson said that out of an estimated 250 prisoners released so far from the US naval base in Cuba, about 15 had returned to the battlefield.
"Therefore we have to be careful," she said.
Since the September 11 2001 terror attacks, about 750 people have been held at Guantanamo, of whom only 10 have been formally charged.
Most were captured after the US-led war that toppled the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.
The US government is still holding almost 500 detainees at Guantanamo.