MIAMI – The government of Kazakhstan said it accepted five cleared Guantanamo detainees from the Obama administration last month as asylum seekers.
The Pentagon sent the three Yemenis and two Tunisians from the base in southeast Cuba for resettlement in Kazakhstan on Dec. 30. But the Kazakh Foreign Ministry said in a statement on its website Monday that their asylum requests were still under review by the Ministry of Internal Affairs.
It said Kazakhstan agreed to take the men, who had never been charged with a crime at Guantanamo, “for humanitarian reasons” based on their applications for refugee status through the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.
It also said unnamed “international human rights organizations” were bearing the costs of taking in the men.
The transfer, which reduced Guantanamo’s detainee population to 127 war-on-terror captives, occurred about two weeks after Secretary of State John Kerry hosted Kazakh Foreign Minister Yerlan Idrisov at the State Department with a working lunch.
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