SANAA: Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh said yesterday that his country had rejected a US proposal to send 94 Yemeni detainees from the military prison in Guantanamo, Cuba, to Saudi Arabia to be rehabilitated.

“The administration of former US President George W. Bush has contacted us and told us of its plans to extradite the Yemeni detainees to Saudi Arabia, where they could be sent through a rehabilitation program,” Saleh said in a speech during an annual conference for police commanders in Sanaa.

“We rejected the proposal and told them we would build a rehabilitation center where the returnees would be re-educated to shun extremism and fanaticism,” he said.

Saleh said 94 Yemeni Guantanamo detainees were expected to be released and handed over to Yemeni authorities within “60 to 90 days.” He said the center would include a clinic, mosque and a school, and that it would host the returnees and their families.

An official newspaper said on Thursday that the Yemeni government was setting up a center where more than 100 Yemenis are to undergo rehabilitation after their expected release from the Guantanamo Bay prison.

The Defense Ministry’s mouthpiece publication 26 September said the center would be built with US government assistance.

In the new facility, the inmates would undergo a series of “edification programs based on moderation to shun extremism and terrorism,” the paper said.

US President Barack Obama signed a series of executive orders on Thursday to close the controversial prison at Guantanamo Bay within a year.

About 100 of about 250 detainees at the controversial prison camp are Yemenis. They have become the single largest nationality imprisoned at Guantanamo as the prison’s population steadily declined from a peak of 600 in 2003.

Thirteen Yemenis have been released from the facility since it was set up in 2002.

Of these, five were later released by Yemeni authorities while the rest were put on trial in Yemen for falsifying identification documents. None were charged with terrorism-related activities.

On Nov. 26, Yemen received Salim Hamdan, the former driver of Al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden, who was released from Guantanamo at the end of his jail term handed down by a military commission over supporting terrorism.

Hamdan, 40, was detained for about six weeks in an intelligence prison in Sanaa before he was released.