January 31 — French authorities sent over the weekend to Guantanamo to make contact with several detainees said by US officials to hold French nationality, have returned from their trip, but say they were able to identify only two of the detainees as being French citizens.

The delegation, which was sent to the US base on the Eastern tip of Cuba by the French Foreign Affairs Ministry, the Quai d’Orsay, had been informed earlier by way of a CIA document that six or seven of the "French Talibans" had been identified as holding French nationality.

According to the delegation, only two of the men included on the list, which had been supplied to authorities in mid-January, could in fact be identified as holding French nationality.

The persons listed on the CIA document, which is at the centre of a dispute between French and US authorities after a copy was leaked in Paris to the press, were obviously included, suggest representatives of the delegation, because they were supposedly heard to speak French.

The two men who were identified by the delegation as holding French passports are Nizar Sassi and Khaled ben Mustafa, both in their 20s, and both from Venissieux, in the poor urban suburbs of Lyons.

They were said by the visiting delegation to appear to be in good health. The two men, according to the Quai d’Orsay, did not request access to consular officials over their upcoming trials, but requested only that the French authorities notify their families of their presence at the detention facility.

The mayor of Venissieux, however, says he doesn’t care for the trial to be held on US soil, even if Guantanamo doesn’t technically qualify as American territory, and wants for the French government to have the two residents of his city repatriated to France.

Says Andre Gerin, a member of the French Communist Party, "There’s a danger in letting the CIA undertake their interrogations, under these particular circumstances," he says, "then too their trial over here in France might set a good example" for other local young men tempted by Islamic fundamentalism, which appears to be the case of the two men detained, both of whom apparently were captured by US forces in Afghanistan.

Former neighbours of Nizar Sassi at Venissieux have expressed their surprise over his identification as one of the "French Talibans" incarcerated at Guantanamo.

Said one person who had worked with him when Mr. Sassi was a local mediator charged with dealing with some of the local urban poor, "nobody ever complained about him, he never seemed to be interested in religious matters, certainly he hadn’t any of the makings of a future terrorist".