Slovakia will accept three prisoners from the US prison facility at Guantanamo Bay, writes the sme.sk web portal, quoting a source from the Slovak Foreign Ministry. It wrote that the ministry is to officially announce later on January 19 that Slovakia will accept three Guantanamo detainees over the course of this year.
The source specified for the web portal that the prisoners should not be dangerous terrorists. Persons alleged to be unlawful combatants captured in Afghanistan and later in Iraq and terrorist suspects from al-Qaeda and Taliban are held in Guantanamo.
U.S President Barack Obama pledged to shut the detention facility, the SITA newswire wrote. He signed orders to shut the military prison by January 2010, but White House officials quickly encountered resistance from members of Congress opposed to moving prisoners to US soil and they hoped that other countries would accept detainees.
President Obama directly acknowledged for the first time on November 18, 2009, that the prison at Guantanamo Bay will not close by the January deadline he set, but he said he hoped to still achieve that goal sometime in 2010. sme.sk, SITA
Compiled by Zuzana Vilikovská from press reports
The Slovak Spectator cannot vouch for the accuracy of the information presented in its Flash News postings.
