Yemen asked the United States on Thursday to repatriate all Yemenis held at the Guantanamo Bay military prison, Yemen's state news agency Saba reported.
The agency said Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh made the request during a telephone conversation with US President Barack Obama. Saleh "reiterated Yemen's demands for the repatriation of all Yemeni detainees in Guantanamo with their files," dpa quoted Saba as saying.
The Yemeni leader told Obama that his government would "take all the legal procedures towards them," the agency said, adding that Saleh stressed his government's readiness to "rehabilitate" prisoners.
Obama informed Saleh about the extradition of a Yemeni inmate this week and "emphasized that his administration was studying the situation of the Yemeni detainees in Guantanamo and their extradition to Yemen for rehabilitation," Saba said.
Yemenis are now the largest single group among the 180 prisoners remaining at Guantanamo.
Last year, Saleh said that Yemen had rejected a US proposal to send 94 Yemeni detainees from Guantanamo to Saudi Arabia, where they could be put through a rehabilitation programme. He said the Yemeni government would build a rehabilitation centre, where the returnees would be re-educated to shun extremism and fanaticism.
Hundreds of prisoners have been released from the Guantanamo prison since it was set up in 2002; only 14 of those freed so far were from Yemen.