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A US federal judge on Tuesday ordered the release into the United States of a group of Chinese Muslims once suspected of terrorism who are being held in Guantanamo Bay prison, a court official told AFP. The US government declared the group of 17 Uighurs to no longer be "enemy combatants" this year but had maintained it could continue to hold them in Guantanamo if no other country accepted them.
China has urged the US to repatriate the "terrorist suspects," but Washington has resisted due to fears the group would be tortured upon return. For several years, the United States has attempted to persuade other countries to resettle the Uighurs, part of an ethnic group which populates much of western China that Beijing considers seditious. Only Albania has agreed to do so, offering to take five of them in 2006. Most of the Uighurs were turned over to the United States from Pakistan in late 2001 in exchange for bounties.
The group was living in a self-contained camp in Afghanistan when the US-led coalition bombing campaign began in October 2001. They fled to the mountains but were turned over to Pakistani authorities, who in turn handed them to the United States. Humans rights groups have campaigned against their continued detention.
"The Uighur detainees have been held at Guantanamo for nearly seven years, even though the government acknowledges they should be freed," said Jennifer Daskal, senior counterterrorism counsel at Human Rights Watch, on Monday. "Since Washington has failed to resettle the Uighurs elsewhere, it should parole them into the United States," she said. A lawyer for the detainees said in January that the Uighurs were being held in extremely brutal solitary confinement.

Copyright Agence France-Presse, 2008

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