China said Friday that five Chinese Uighur Muslims given political asylum in Albania were suspected terrorists and should be handed over to Beijing.
"The suspected Chinese terrorists should be handed over to China and they should not be given asylum status," the foreign ministry told AFP in a statement.
The five Uighur Muslims belonged to an East Turkestan organization which is recognized by the United Nations as a terrorist grouping, the statement said.
Albania has granted the five asylum after they were released from the US prison camp in Guantanamo Bay, an Albanian government official said Wednesday.
The asylum requests by the Uighurs, who were resettled in Albania after being released from the detention camp in Cuba in May, had been approved earlier this month, an Albanian interior ministry source who requested anonymity told AFP.
The Albanian government has not formally informed Beijing that the asylum had been granted, the Chinese statement said.
At the time of their release to Albania, China demanded the handover of the five, but Tirana said it would first investigate the five.
The US government had refused the repatriation of the Uighurs to China on the basis that they were not "enemy combatants". The five had been captured in Pakistan.
US authorities had asked nearly two dozen nations to provide asylum for the Uighur detainees, with all but Albania apparently refusing partly because they did not want to anger the Chinese.
Some 15 Uighurs are still believed to be in detention at the US-run camp, according to human rights groups.
Uighurs, the largest ethnic group in China's far northwest Xinjiang region, are an overwhelmingly Muslim, Turkic-speaking people.
They have been struggling to re-establish an independent state of East Turkestan in Xinjiang since it became an autonomous region of China in 1955.
They accuse the ruling Chinese of political, religious and cultural repression in the name of counter-terrorism efforts.
