The US ruled out the possible return of 22 Chinese...

The US ruled out the possible return of 22 Chinese prisoners held at its Guantanamo Bay detention centre to China because it feared they could be tortured or executed, according to a senior US official.
The prisoners, captured in Afghanistan, were Muslim Uighurs from China's north-west Xinjiang region, where separatists had fought a low-level insurgency against Beijing for decades.
The US official, who asked not to be named, said the prisoners had no more intelligence value and could be released, but the US had not been able to find a country willing to take them.
"We can't send them back," he said. Amnesty International had the previous month raised the case of 22 Uighurs it said were being held at Guantanamo, saying they were likely to face torture and possibly execution if repatriated.
China and the US denied Amnesty's claim that China had sent interrogators to Guantanamo and had subjected the Uighurs to "stress and duress" techniques, such as sleep deprivation and extreme temperatures.
The US released more than two dozen prisoners from Guantanamo in January after some were found to have been wrongly imprisoned. However four, including a Syrian and an Iranian, remained in a US-run prison at Baghram, Afghanistan, because they could not be sent home, a Pentagon official said.