Washington has asked Germany to take in some of the 17 Uighurs held at Guantanamo Bay for years and cleared for release, while France will accept an Algerian inmate, US officials said on Tuesday.
The administration of US President Barack Obama also plans to release some of the Uighurs in the US, a US official said, although a US senator has vowed to oppose the move.
Attorney General Eric Holder formally asked Germany to take the Uighurs — Muslims from China’s Xinjiang Province — during his April 29 visit to Berlin, a US official said on condition of anonymity.
Meanwhile, France has agreed to accept Algerian Lakhdar Boumediene, 43, held at Guantanamo for seven years and cleared of wrongdoing in November, sources said on Tuesday.
Obama has vowed to shut the notorious “war on terror” jail located at the US naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, by January.
Many of the inmates have already been cleared for release, but US officials are having difficulty finding countries that will take them in, and meeting resistance at home to housing them on US soil.
US officials have tried for years to transfer the Uighurs, captured in 2001 in Afghanistan, to a third country, saying they face the risk of persecution if they return to China, as Beijing regards them as “Chinese terrorists.”
The German interior ministry said on Sunday it had received a request to take in Guantanamo prisoners, but did not give their identities or their number.
On Capitol Hill, Republican US Senator Saxby Chambliss said he planned to introduce legislation that would block the release on US soil of any Guantanamo detainee and refuse funding for any such move.
The bill is aimed at reassuring the US public that the ex-detainees are “not going to be re-released into their neighborhoods where they’re going to immediately form cells where they will seek to kill and harm Americans,” Chambliss said.
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