Gitmo Detainee Transfer Plan Angers China

Beijing said Thursday that the 17 Chinese Muslims the United States is sending to the Pacific island nation of Palau are terrorists and should be handed back to China instead.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang said the United States should "stop handing over terrorist suspects to any third country, so as to expatriate them to China at an early date."

Palau President Johnson Toribiong said Thursday that the ethnic Uighurs have become international vagabonds" who deserve his country's age-old tradition of hospitality.

The 17 were captured in Afghanistan and Pakistan in 2001 but later determined by the Pentagon to not be enemy combatants after being detained in Guantanamo Bay.

"China also opposes any country taking any of these terrorist suspects," Qin said. He did not say if China would take any action in response to the U.S. move.

Beijing says the detainees are members of extremist groups working to separate the far western region of Xinjiang from China.

Palau does not have diplomatic relations with China, which may make it harder for Beijing to pressure Palau. Instead, it has ties with Taiwan.

A former U.S. trust territory in the Pacific, Palau has retained close ties with the United States since independence in 1994 and is entitled to U.S. protection under an accord.

The Obama administration faced fierce congressional opposition to allowing the Uighurs on U.S. soil as free men and sought alternatives abroad.

The U.S. has said it feared the men would be executed if they returned to China.

Toribiong said the Uighur detainees from China's arid west would start their new lives in a halfway house to see how they acclimatize to his tropical archipelago west of the Philippines. He called Palau a "Christian nation" but with a 450-member Muslim community.

"It's an old-age tradition of Palauans to accommodate the homeless who find their way to the shores of Palau," Toribiong told The Associated Press in a telephone interview. "We did agree to accept them due to the fact that they have become basically homeless and need to find a place of refuge and freedom."