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[quote=MARRIE,366174]Germany rejects Guantanamo inmatesBy Zhang Xin (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-05-12 07:49

Citing security concerns, Germany has reversed a decision to take in nine Chinese detained at Guantanamo Bay.

The US is trying to find homes for the detainees as it shuts down the controversial prison. But Germany's interior minister Wolfgang Schaeuble told a newspaper the US has not provided adequate information on the prisoners, AFP reported.

Officials in some German federal states also made U-turns and now oppose the inmates' resettlement, AFP reported.

The interior minister of Bavaria, Joachim Herrmann, said "no" to the move as he told German media Bild that security intelligence showed seven of the nine Uygurs - Muslims from Northwest China's Xinjiang autonomous region - had received training from the East Turkestan Islamic Movement and had contacts with militant Islamist organizations.

"We have no interest in exposing ourselves to additional risk," Holger Hoevelmann, interior minister of Germany's Saxony-Anhalt state, told the Frankfurter Rundschau daily newspaper.

US President Barack Obama has been lobbying allies in Europe and elsewhere to resettle the Guantanamo detainees, who the US claim pose no security threat but can't return to their home countries.

Obama has vowed to shut the notorious jail, which has been dogged by reports of prison torture under the Bush administration, by January 2010.

Feng Zhongping, an expert in European studies with the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, said it was not surprising for Germany to change its mind because of rising domestic pressure. 
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