MIAMI — The United States sent four Guantanamo detainees to European countries for resettlement over the weekend — three to Slovakia and another to Switzerland, U.S. officials said Monday.
The secret transfers, amid a hustle of air activity bound for relief operations in Haiti, left the prison camp census at 192 foreign captives.
It was also the second set of releases since the White House put an indefinite hold on the repatriation of Yemenis because a Nigerian man who tried to bomb a Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas Day had studied in Yemen.
The Defense Department repatriated two men to Algeria on Wednesday.
A Department of Justice announcement of
the Slovak transfer said the U.S. government was withholding the
identities and nationalities of the three men, at their new country’s
request, “for security and privacy reasons.”
There was no formal disclosure Monday of the fourth weekend transfer, an Uzbek who was sent to Switzerland
under a diplomatic agreement reached in December. Swiss officials would
not comment Monday but at the time described the captive being offered
resettlement as a citizen of Uzbekistan who was captured in Afghanistan in 2002 and cleared for release three years later.
The Swiss said then that they interviewed the detainee at Guantanamo
in August, concluded that he had no links to a terrorist group, and
also received American assurances that he posed no public risk.
He has promised to respect Swiss law, learn the French language and find a job, a Swiss government statement said.
U.S. State Department envoy Daniel Fried has been negotiating a kind of asylum for Guantanamo
detainees who have been approved for release but cannot go home because
they fear bias or torture as devout Muslims. Others carry the stigma of
detention as a presumed terror suspect at the remote U.S. base in
southeast Cuba.
The latest transfers come at a time of increasing activity at Guantanamo. Hundreds of U.S. forces are transitioning the Navy base to help international relief operations in and around Haiti. Meantime, the Pentagon has suspended media visits to the prison camps, at least until Feb. 18.
The Slovak Foreign Ministry, in the capital Bratislava, said last week it had agreed to resettle the three men as a “gesture of solidarity” with President Barack Obama’s pledge to empty and close the detention center.
None of the three men it was resettling was accused or convicted of any crime, a Foreign Ministry statement said.
The White House last week failed to meet its own one-year deadline for closure, set by Obama on Jan. 22, 2009.
Other European nations, including France, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain, have accepted detainees in recent months. The two Italy took in were held pending a terror trial.
The other countries were resettling the former Guantanamo captives.
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