WASHINGTON - The Obama administration has once renewed its commitment to completing the transfer of the Bagram prison and inmates to Afghan control. However, it suggested Kabul also needed to meet its commitment.

"We need to ensure as we finish this process of releasing all of the prisoners into Afghan custody that both sides are fulfilling the full intent and spirit of the memorandum that we signed," State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland said on Monday.

Addressing her daily news conference, she did not give details of the commitment that Kabul had not fulfilled by the Karzai government. "We have to ensure reciprocal commitments are met," she said, adding they were working through the cases.

"We are committed to fulfilling the commitments that we made under the Memorandum of Understanding on Detentions. This was signed in March and it contains reciprocal commitments to provide for the security of Afghan citizens, the ANSF, coalition forces, by keeping captured enemy combatants from returning to the battlefield," she said.

The US continued to work through a number of cases with the Afghan government to ensure that commitments were kept on both sides, Nuland said, hoping that a solution to the problem would be found.

Earlier in the day, the Karzai administration asked the US military to immediately release the Afghan prisoners being held at the Bagram detention facility in violation of court verdicts.

Seventy Afghans, whose release has been ordered by courts, continue to languish in the main prison in central Parwan province, Karzai's chief spokesman Aimal Faizi told a news conference in Kabul. (Pajhwok)