MIAMI: A Guantanamo Bay prisoner who protested his indefinite confinement with a lengthy hunger strike has taken the unusual step of turning down a chance to finally leave the US base in Cuba, rejecting an offer to be resettled in an unfamiliar new country.

Muhammad Bawazir, a 35-year-old from Yemen, refused to board a plane as two other prisoners were being flown out for resettlement in the Balkans, his lawyer, John Chandler, said. Since returning to his homeland was not an option, he insisted on being sent to a country where he has family.

Chandler said he spent months trying to persuade Bawazir to accept the resettlement in another country he refused to name. But the prisoner, who was 21 when captured in Afghanistan, apparently decided at the last minute he couldn’t do it.

“It’s a country I’d go to in a heartbeat,” the Atlanta-based attorney said. “I can’t help you with the logic of his position. It’s just a very emotional reaction from a man who has been locked up for 14 years. “

Several prisoners over the years have resisted returning to their own countries, fearing they might be imprisoned and tortured. Some ethnic Uighurs held for years at Guantanamo once spurned a resettlement officer in the Pacific island nation of Palau because it seemed too close to China, the country they said they fled because of intense persecution.

Still, the decision by Bawazir is unusual. Yemeni prisoners at Guantanamo, who can’t be sent to their homeland because of the civil war there, have been described by officials and lawyers as eager for any way out of the prison.

“The rest of the guys there, if I had offered them the opportunity to go they would have said ‘show me the plane,’ said Chandler, who has three clients at Guantanamo after two others went to the UAE for resettlement.

The two prisoner releases brought to 16 the total to leave in January as President Barack Obama works to whittle down the number of low-level detainees as he seeks to close the detention center on the base and move the remainder of the men to the US.