WASHINGTON: No detainees from the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay were recently released or transferred, Pentagon officials said yesterday, denying reports that two suspects had been handed over to Mauritania.
“There was no release,” Pentagon spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Samuel House said. “We still have 166 detainees.”
Activists and security officials in Nouakchott just hours earlier said two Mauritanian detainees had been returned to the capital city on Friday night.
Hamoud Ould Nebagha, the head of a group that works for the liberation of Mauritanians held at Guantanamo, said two men — Mohamedou Ould Slahi and Ahmed Ould Abdel Aziz — arrived in Nouakchott “having been cleared by American tribunals.”
He said they had both been held at the US prison camp in southern Cuba for several
years.
Slahi was detained on suspicion of being a member of the so-called “Hamburg cell” in Germany linked to the September 11 attacks in the United States in 2001.
However, Lieutenant Todd Breasseale, also a spokesman at the Pentagon, said reports that any detainees were transferred from the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay recently “are patently false.”
“The last transfer was to Canada, months ago,” he said yesterday.
Of those still languishing at the US military prison, more than half — 86 — have been cleared for transfer, some of them for the past five years, but the problem has been finding nations that are willing to take them.
AFP
