WASHINGTON, April 4: The US government was considering moving a second US-born prisoner from the war in Afghanistan to the United States from an American military jail in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, US officials said.

They said that a final decision had not been made, but that a US aircraft was standing by to move Yasser Esam Hamdi, 22, believed to have been born in Louisiana before going to Saudi Arabia with his parents as an infant, from the US Navy base in Cuba to the United States.

One US official said Hamdi would be transferred to a US defence facility while the government decided what to do with him.

As a result, he would not immediately be joining another American, John Walker Lindh, in jail in the Washington suburb of Alexandria, Virginia. Both men were captured in December in an uprising by Taliban and Al Qaeda prisoners outside Mazar-i-Sharif.—Reuters