The United States has transferred three detainees at the US naval base detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to Afghanistan, Maldives and Pakistan for release, the Pentagon announced Saturday.

The three detainees were found to no longer be an "enemy combatant" by a military panel, the Pentagon said in a statement.

With Saturday's transfer, 214 detainees have left Guantanamo, with 149 transferred for release and 65 for continued detention byother governments, leaving about 540 others still being jailed there.

The Pentagon said that its decision to transfer or release a detainee was based on a number of factors, including whether the detainee was of further intelligence value and whether he was believed to pose a continuing threat to the United States if released.

The Pentagon initially declared that all detainees at Guantanamo, most of whom were captured during the US-led war in Afghanistan, were "enemy combatants" and could be held indefinitely without charges, rather than prisoners of war who would have the right to protection under the Geneva Conventions.

The Pentagon was reportedly seeking to cut by more than half the detainee population at Guantanamo, in part by transferring hundreds of suspected terrorists to prisons in Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan and Yemen, after the US Supreme Court ruled last June that US law applied to Guantanamo and that prisoners there could challenge their detentions in federal courts in the United States.

Xinhua