Four remaining Britons and an Australian held at Guantanamo Bay will be released soon, the Pentagon said today, amid reports the number of prisoners at the US base will be radically reduced.
The United States holds about 550 non-US citizens at Guantanamo. Only four have been charged.
British Foreign Secretary Mr Jack Straw told parliament today the Americans had agreed to free the four Britons while Australia's Attorney General Philip Ruddock said Australian Mamdouh Habib was being sent home at Canberra's request.
"The US government has now agreed to the return of all four men to the United Kingdom," Mr Straw said.
"(They) will be returned in the next few weeks." A Pentagon spokesman did not confirm the releases, saying only: "We're regularly in negotiations with other countries, including the United Kingdom and Australia, about transferring detainees from Guantanamo."
Britain's Financial Times reported this week that the release was part of a plan to radically reduce the number of prisoners held at the base in Cuba.
It quoted a US defence official as saying that an increase in the number of transfers to an unspecified number of the 19 countries whose nationals are being held at Guantanamo Bay was part of a plan to create a permanent prison at the base.
The prison, to be called Camp Six, would have space for up to 200 detainees whom the US does not want to see released, the paper said.
The four Britons - Feroz Abbasi, Martin Mubanga, Richard Belmar and Moazzam Begg - have been held for three years at Guantanamo, which was set up four months after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the US to hold combatants captured in Afghanistan and others suspected of association with al-Qaeda.