TORONTO -- Canada said Friday it spurned a request from the Obama administration to resettle some Chinese citizens cleared for release from the U.S. military prison in Guantánamo Bay.

Kory Teneycke, a spokesman for Prime Minister Stephen Harper, said the U.S. inquired recently about whether Ottawa might grant asylum to some of the 17 Muslims from China called Uighurs.

''Canada is not looking to take any detainees from Guantánamo,'' Teneycke told The Associated Press. ``In the case of the Uighurs and other Guantánamo Bay detainees Canada has no interest.''

The Uighurs in particular have no connection to Canada, he said, and there are security concerns.

The spokesman, however, noted there was a distinction in the case of Canadian detainee Omar Khadr, 22, who was born in Toronto, captured in Afghanistan at age 15 and is facing a war-crimes murder trial at the remote outpost in southeast Cuba.

A Canadian court has ruled that the Harper government must ask the U.S. to repatriate Khadr, the last Western detainee at Guantánamo.

The Canadian government is now appealing that ruling.

Harper has steadfastly refused to get involved in Khadr's case, saying the U.S. legal process has to play itself out. The son of a well-known militant Muslim Canadian familyis charged with killing an American soldier in Afghanistan, and could be sentenced to life in prison if convicted by a jury of U.S. military officres, called a commission.

U.S. authorities no longer consider the Uighurs enemy combatants but have not been able to find a country willing to accept them and have opposed their release into the United States.

The Uighurs fear persecution if they are sent back to China.

Beijing alleges they are terrorists who belong to an outlawed separatist group. China has warned other countries not to accept them and has said they must be returned to China. The U.S. has refused based on fears they will be tortured in their native country.

Teneycke doesn't expect Canada's refusal to hurt relations.

''I think we have a very strong relationship with the United States and with the Obama administration and I anticipate that that relationship will be unaffected by this,'' Teneycke said.

Three of the Uighurs applied for political asylum in Canada earlier this year but Canada has previously privately balked at several requests from the Bush administration to take them.

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