France says Guantanamo visits were administrative

PARIS - France has defended visits by officials to a US military camp at Cuba's Guantanamo Bay between 2002 and 2004 following a report which has thrown a terrorism trial into turmoil.

Responding to the report that French intelligence agents had interviewed six men on trial in France for links with a network plotting terrorist attacks while they were held at Guantanamo, the French Foreign Ministry said it had made no secret of three visits to the camp between 2002-2004.

"These missions, which were of an administrative nature, were aimed at identifying precisely French citizens who might have been at Guantanamo and at assessing their situation in a general manner," it said in a statement dated Wednesday.

It added that the aim was also to gather information needed to allow France to prevent terrorism and that representatives of other government officials had taken part in these missions to help achieve both these goals.

The Liberation daily on Wednesday published a French diplomatic telegram referring to intelligence agents conducting interviews at least twice while the men were held without charge on the Caribbean island.

A top French court has already ruled that the detention of suspects in the US naval base was illegal, and defence lawyers said the prosecution's case was based in large part on information gleaned from the secret interviews.

The failure to include the interviews in the case file was a serious breach of defendants' rights which could later see a superior court rule the trial invalid, the lawyers told reporters.

Presiding Judge Jean-Claude Kross has refused to halt the 3-day-old trial over a document whose authenticity had not been fully established. He said he would take a view on the issue at the end of the trial, which is expected to last until mid-July.

- REUTERS