PARIS, July 6 (Xinhua) -- France has made no secrets of visits by officials to a U.S. military camp at Cuba's Guantanamo Bay between 2002-2004, the French Foreign Ministry said in a statement on Wednesday.

    "These missions, which were of an administrative nature, were aimed at identifying precisely French citizens who might have been at Guantanamo and at assessing their situation in a general manner," it said.

    The visits also aimed to gather information needed to allow France to prevent terrorism, and representatives of other government officials had taken part in these missions to help achieve both these goals, the statement said.

    The French trials were made public on Wednesday by a report on The Liberation daily that French agents secretly interviewed six men on trial in France for links with a terrorist network while they were held at a Guantanamo camp.

    It published a French diplomatic telegram referring to intelligence agents conducting interviews at least twice during these men's detention on the Caribbean island.

    A top French court has already ruled that the detention of suspects in the U.S. naval base was illegal. Enditem