The US government wants to deport a group of Chinese Muslims held at the Guantanamo prison camp to Germany and is pressuring Chancellor Angela Merkel to take in the ethnic Uighurs, a newspaper reported yesterday. The German daily Die Welt quoted diplomatic sources saying Merkel’s government has resisted the US pressure to accept the 15 Uighurs from the restive, predominantly Muslim region of Xinjiang in China’s northwest. “We have no comment on the report,” a government spokesman in Berlin said yesterday. Merkel is the only European leader to have publicly called on the United States to close the camp.The men, who oppose China’s Communist rule, are from the region that was known as East Turkestan until it was annexed by the Manchu Empire in 1884. Its Uighur inhabitants, a Muslim Turkic people, want more autonomy; some want independence.