The US has cleared 38 foreign nationals held at a naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, of their controversial status as "enemy combatants" and said they will be sent to their home countries soon.
Navy Secretary Gordon England said on Tuesday the decision had been reached following a 10-month-long review of the cases of 558 detainees captured in Afghanistan and other countries in the course of the war on terror and shipped to Guantanamo for interrogation and possible prosecution.
Special tribunals have confirmed the status of 520 detainees, according to England.
"The tribunals also concluded that 38 detainees were found to no longer meet the criteria to be designated as enemy combatants," the Navy secretary said.
Five of these inmates have been already returned to their home countries. The State Department, England pointed out, is working to coordinate the return of the remaining 33 "as expeditiously as possible."
But the secretary disclosed that an unspecified number of Muslim activists belonging to China's Uighur minority have not been returned to their homeland, even though they had been removed from the "enemy combatant" list.
He hinted the Pentagon feared the Uighurs, a persecuted religious group in China, would receive harsh treatment from authorities in Beijing, saying that "concerns and issues about returning them to their country" were behind the decision.
US diplomats were working with other countries to find a place of residence for the Uighurs, the secretary said.
England declined to discuss individual cases or disclose the nationality of any of the cleared detainees.
But he vehemently denied the inmates had been brought to Guantanamo by mistake, pointing out that a determination that "a detainee no longer meets a criteria for classification as an enemy combatant [EC] does not necessarily mean that the prior classification as EC was wrong."
The announcement of the impending prisoner release followed a ruling by US District Judge Joyce Green in January, which declared the review tribunals unconstitutional and biased against the detainees.
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