PARIS, March 28: The French Foreign Ministry said on today that a second delegation of French officials arrived late on Wednesday at Guantanamo, with the objective of establishing just how many “French Talibans” are really incarcerated at the US facility.

It is also possible, says a French judicial source, that the delegation could very well return with some of the French Taliban as part of a deal which would see them tried on French soil, a demand that French authorities have been making with insistence in recent weeks.

In a fierce exchange with reporters yesterday, a Quai d’Orsay spokesman was unable to come up with a firm figure as to how many French Taliban prisoners were in fact being held prisoner by US special forces at the Cuban facility.

Back in January, the CIA liaison office at the US Embassy in Paris had circulated a list indicating that there were seven French Taliban at Guantanamo, but that figure was reduced to two once the seven French-speakers were interrogated by a first delegation sent by France.

When queried as to whether there four, six, indeed seven prisoners in all, the spokesman noted that “all we’ve really been able to identify are two Taliban who hold French nationality. The press has apparently identified five others. But since that moment it’s possible that other (French Talibans) have arrived.”

SUICIDE: Richard Durn, 33, the lone gunman who killed eight persons on Wednesday at a town hall meeting in the Paris suburb of Nanterre, committed suicide on Thursday, while undergoing interrogation at the police headquarters here.