French court resumes trial of Guantanamo inmates

PARIS (Reuters) - A French court on Monday resumed the trial on terrorism charges of six former Guantanamo Bay inmates whose lawyers say they were illegally questioned by French agents while in American hands.

The trial over alleged links to al Qaeda began last year but was thrown into turmoil after it emerged that French agents secretly interviewed the six in 2002 during their detention at the U.S. military camp on the island of Cuba.

The court on September 26, 2006 postponed its verdict on the case and ordered that the French secret agents should be questioned, as should the diplomat who informed Paris of the Guantanamo encounter.

The court received the names of the agents but has not been able to question them, though it has interviewed other officials.

The defence has contested the legality of the meetings, which it said took place at a time when the men were held in leg irons and detained in cages in the heat of the sun. It called on Monday for the trial to be cancelled and the men to be released.

The new hearing is expected to re-examine all the facts of the case.

Before the case was adjourned, the prosecution had said five of the six men, all French nationals, received military training in al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan between 2000 and 2001 and called for relatively lenient jail terms that take into account their detention in Guantanamo. It had also said there was not enough evidence to convict the sixth man.

During the 2006 hearings, five of the men had confirmed they had been in al Qaeda training camps but said they had been recruited in France and said they had not carried out any military action before their capture.

The men were arrested in Afghanistan and Pakistan after the United States invaded Afghanistan in 2001, and were transferred to Guantanamo. They were eventually returned to France in 2004 and 2005 after negotiations between Paris and Washington.

(Writing by Swaha Pattanaik, Editing by Mark Trevelyan)