A US soldier keeps watch from a guard tower on Guantanamo Bay US Naval Base in Cuba. (Associated Press)
Montevideo:
A former Guantanamo inmate resettled in Uruguay after staging a hunger strike appealed Thursday to neighboring Argentina to take in more prisoners from the controversial US military detention center.
Syrian national Jihad Diyab, one of six former Guantanamo inmates released in Uruguay as refugees in December, traveled to the Argentine capital Buenos Aires to call on the government there to follow Uruguay's lead.
"I'm never going to forget my comrades who are still there (at Guantanamo). That's why I came here to continue the struggle. For example, the Argentine government can take in Guantanamo prisoners here for humanitarian reasons," Diyab, 43, told journalists from two radio stations.
Diyab was dressed in his orange prison jumpsuit as he spoke to the journalists, said one reporter who was present, Martin Suarez of rights group Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo's radio station.
"These clothes are part of me. Before I got out, they told me to change my clothes and put on a brown suit. I put it on over this, because it's symbolic and very important to me," he said, in comments translated from Arabic into Spanish.
While a prisoner, Diyab launched a court case in the United States in an unsuccessful bid to stop prison officials from force-feeding him during his hunger strike.
He lashed out Thursday at the US government, saying he and his fellow inmates had been unjustly labelled "enemy combattants."
"Americans' true enemy is American government policy," he said.
The Uruguayan government allows Diyab and the other resettled former inmates to travel freely.
He made the trip to Buenos Aires with a Uruguayan travel document, taking one of the high-speed ferries that link the Argentine and Uruguayan capitals across the River Plate.
Besides Diyab, Uruguay took in three other Syrian inmates, a Palestinian and a Tunisian, all in their 30s and 40s.
Uruguay's left-wing President Jose Mujica agreed to resettle the inmates on "humanitarian grounds" in a bid to help his US counterpart Barack Obama fulfill his long-delayed promise to close the prison set up in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.
The inmates had spent more than 12 years in detention without charge.
Currently, 122 prisoners remain at the facility at the US naval base in southeastern Cuba.
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