The Pentagon announced Saturday that it had transferred 35 detainees from prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to Pakistani custody, part of a continuing effort by the Bush administration to reduce the number of prisoners at the naval base there.
Under the terms of the transfer, which a Pentagon spokesman said Saturday had already been completed, Pakistan will hold 29 of the detainees while releasing another six. Pakistani officials said that the detainees, 34 Pakistanis and one Afghan, arrived there late Saturday, Agence France-Presse reported. A Pentagon spokesman refused to confirm whether one of the released detainees was from Afghanistan.
The transfers came after extended negotiations between the Bush administration and the Pakistani government. The two governments have been talking since March about how to accomplish the release of Pakistani detainees, officials said.
"This is part of our effort to return a large number of Guantanamo detainees to their home countries," a State Department official familiar with the talks said Saturday.
The release of the detainees also came just before the Pakistani president, General Pervez Musharraf, was due to arrive in the US, where he is scheduled to speak to the UN.
Musharraf will meet with US President George W. Bush in New York tomorrow and Wednesday, a White House spokesman said.
In June, the US Supreme Court denied the Bush administration's contention that the prisoners at Guantanamo, captured in the effort to combat terrorism, were outside the reach of US law.
The court said the detainees were entitled to full hearings on their status. In a rebuke to the White House, the court declared that "a state of war is not a blank check for the president."
Since then, the Bush administration has sought to adjust to the changed legal conditions that govern Guantanamo. It has held hearings to decide whether some detainees can be deemed unlawful combatants, while in other cases the administration has accelerated negotiations to try to release some detainees to the custody of their home countries.
Other detainees have been transferred to the control of Morocco, France, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Spain, Sweden and Britain.
Negotiations with Yemen and Saudi Arabia are under way to transfer more detainees, an administration official said.
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