Gitmo inmate wants to stay put

This was supposed to be the moment Ahmed Bel Bacha was waiting for _ the end of his five years in prison at Guantanamo Bay. Instead, the Algerian is fighting to stay put rather than return home.

Bel Bacha, reportedly slated to leave Guantanamo Bay soon along with three of his countrymen, fears he will be tortured back in Algeria, a country he had already fled once before to seek asylum in Britain, his lawyers say.

And so lawyers for the 38-year-old former hotel cleaner have been waging an 11th-hour attempt to keep him temporarily at Guantanamo while looking for another country to give him political asylum.

Bel Bacha _ captured in Pakistan and deemed an enemy combatant by the U.S. _ is not alone in his fears. Human rights groups say at least two dozen Guantanamo detainees _ including many from the North African countries of Libya, Algeria and Tunisia _ are afraid they will face abuse upon returning home.

"How many times is the U.S. willing to take the risk with someone's life and send them back to regimes with terrible human rights records?" said Zachary Katznelson, an attorney for the rights group Reprieve, which represents Bel Bacha and three dozen other detainees. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International are among other groups that are worried.

About 80 detainees have been declared eligible for release. Navy Cmdr. Jeffrey Gordon, a Pentagon spokesman, said detainees at the U.S. Navy base in Cuba can leave only "once humane treatment and continuing threat concerns have been satisfactorily addressed by the receiving country."

"I reiterate that detainees are not repatriated to countries where it is more likely than not that they will be tortured," he said.

Algeria's presidential office told The Associated Press that Algeria addressed concerns about the prisoners through the country's "constant and incontestable commitment to the struggle against international terrorism," and by having signed "numerous international conventions for the protection of human rights."

But rights groups say countries' promises are not enough.

With President Bush facing international pressure to close the military prison camp down, and with the U.S. administration struggling over what to do with roughly 360 remaining prisoners, rights groups fear U.S. officials may overlook the torture records of inmates' home countries.

In at least one other case in North Africa, a former Guantanamo detainee says he was mistreated after returning to Tunisia.

Abdullah bin Omar's lawyer and wife say the 49-year-old father of eight was struck while in Tunisian custody, and that security services also threatened to rape bin Omar's female family members.

Bin Omar's wife said in an interview that his physical and mental state has improved since his return, though his prison conditions are "appalling."

"If he had known he was going to be treated that way, he wouldn't have accepted to come home" and would have sought asylum elsewhere instead, Khadija Bousaidi told the AP.

Tunisia's Justice Ministry has dismissed the allegations Bin Omar was mistreated as "baseless."

In the case of Algeria, Amnesty said this weekend that U.S. authorities planned to send Bel Bacha and three other Algerians home imminently. Lawyers for Reprieve have asked the Supreme Court to halt Bel Bacha's transfer to Algeria, and the court ordered the U.S. government to respond by Wednesday afternoon.

Algeria is still trying to turn the page on an Islamic insurgency that has killed as many as 200,000 people since 1992, and anyone suspected of terrorist activities or knowledge of Islamist groups there "faces a real risk of secret detention and torture," the Amnesty report said.

Beatings and electric shock treatments are often reported in Algeria, as is a method of tying victims down and forcing them to ingest dirty water, urine or chemicals through a rag stuffed in their mouths, Amnesty has said.

Bel Bacha lived for a time in Britain where he worked as a hotel cleaner before his capture in Pakistan, where he had gone to study the Quran, his family said.

The Pentagon alleged Bel Bacha had weapons training in Afghanistan and met Osama bin Laden twice, declaring him an "enemy combatant." A later review, however, found he no longer posed a threat to the U.S. and could be released.

Bel Bacha has been held at Guantanamo since February 2002 and is held in a solid-wall cell by himself for as many as 22 hours a day. Twenty-four Algerians are being held there, according to the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights.

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Associated Press Writer Bouazza Ben Bouazza in Tunis, Tunisia, Angela Doland in Paris and Michael Melia in San Juan, Puerto Rico, contributed to this report.