WASHINGTON -- In a surprise switch, the U.S. government Thursday said it sent four Muslim Uighurs from a prison camp at Guantánamo to resettlement in Bermuda, not the remote Pacific island archipelago of Palau.

It marked the first time that the U.S. government had found a resettlement site for cleared Guantánamo terror suspects in the Western Hemisphere. Some 500 others have gone to Europe and the Muslim world.

The U.S. government-funded Radio Free Asia broke the news first, identifying the four men granted asylum in Bermuda as Abdulla Abduqadir, 30; Helil Mamut, 31; Ablikim Turahun, 38; and Salahidin Ablehet, 32.

A Boston office of the Bingham McCutchen law firm, which provided some of the Uighurs' legal defense services for years, free of charge, offered different identifications.

They named them as Huzaifa Parhat, Abdul Semet, Abdul Nasser and Jalal Jalaladin.

A Department of Justice announcement offered no names.

On Wednesday, Obama administration officials signalled that they had reached agreement to move 17 Chinese citizens of the Muslim Uighur minority from the soon-to-close Pentagon prison camps in southeast Cuba to Palau.

Unclear Thursday was the fate of the remaining 13 Uighurs who were last seen earlier this month among the 17 at Camp Iguana, a razor-wire ringed half-acre prison camp at Guantánamo for prisoners that federal courts had ordered free.

''The Uighurs were living in a self-contained camp in Afghanistan when the U.S.-led bombing campaign began in October 2001 as part of the military action after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States,'' Radio Free Europe reported in an early morning news release. ``They fled to the mountains but were turned over to Pakistani authorities, who then handed them over to the United States.''

The fate of the Uighurs had been a source of tension for months. U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder had said that some might be resettled in the United States. Citizens in Virginia and Tallahassee had offered to help them. But members of Congress rebelled, saying the captives' Pentagon files suggested the Guantánamo captives had associated with al Qaeda terrorists.

Thursday's transfer is part of an ongoing patchwork of releases for the men who the State Department said would be persecuted as devout Muslims if they were repatriated to their communist homeland.

The Bush administration in 2006 sent five other Uighur captives from Guantánamo to resettlement in Albania. One has since resettled in Sweden.

The Bingham McCutchen law firm characterized their clients' fate this way in a news release issued from Bermuda's administrative capitol of Hamilton:

``They were sold to U.S. forces bybounty hunters and transferred to the Guantánamo prison. Military authorities soon recognized the mistake, but fears of persecution prevented release to their home.''

It said two Bingham partners, Sabin Willett and Susan Baker Manning, accompanied the four men to Bermuda, where they will have the status of foreign guest workers.

A Bingham news release also quoted one of the free men as being grateful.

''Growing up under communism,'' Nasser said in the statement, ``we always dreamed of living in peace andworking in a free society like this one. Today you have let freedom ring.''

The Bingham firm had taken the Uighurs' appeals to the U.S. Supreme Court this year, arguing that they were being unlawfully detained at Guantánamo because both U.S. military processes and a federal judge had cleared them for release.

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