US releases partial list of Guantanamo detainees

The Pentagon released under court order on Friday a partial listing of names and nationalities of the nearly 500 foreign terrorism suspects at Guantanamo Bay, but withheld data on the rest.

Starting with the arrival from Afghanistan of the first group of 20 shackled and masked detainees on January 11, 2002, the US has never released the names and nationalities of all the prisoners at the controversial camp.

While incomplete, the new list was the most extensive made public by the government to date.

The Pentagon released at 6.40 p.m. (12.40 a.m. local time) on Friday more than 5,000 pages of documents relating to hearings conducted at the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, by military panels reviewing the cases of detainees.

Curt Goering, a senior official with Amnesty International US, called upon the Pentagon to release a complete list of detainees at Guantanamo as well as at facilities in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

"It is like kicking and screaming and pulling teeth to get any piece of information" on detainees from the Pentagon, Goering said.

Bryan Whitman, a senior Pentagon spokesman, said the documents contained files on about 317 detainees. He said there are about 490 detainees currently at Guantanamo.

The detainees' names, often without their nationalities clearly stated, were strewn throughout the voluminous documents, making a precise count difficult.

Only 10 of the detainees at Guantanamo have been charged with a crime, and human rights activists have condemned the indefinite detentions and the prisoners' lack of legal rights.

UN rights investigators have called for the closure of the prison.