WASHINGTON: The US defense department – Pentagon - rejected on Monday a call to close the Guantanamo prison for foreign terror suspects and declined to express regret over American jailers mishandling the holy Quran there.

A senior Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman, pressed by a reporter, declined to express regret over the five incidents of what the Southern Command inquiry labeled “mishandling” the Quran, although he added, “Any time that our personnel do something that either violates our policy or procedures is unfortunate.”

He said that the report makes clear that the number of cases of mishandling was small, considering that 1,600 copies of the Quran were distributed to detainees at Guantanamo Bay and that the prisoners underwent more than 28,000 interrogations and thousands of cell moves.

Whitman said the disclosure that US guards or interrogators at the Guantanamo Bay prison desecrated the holy Quran has not triggered the kind of public outrage that erupted after an earlier news report of a Quran being flushed in a toilet.

Meanwhile, the Jeddah-based Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC) has called upon the United States to live up to its responsibilities and not show leniency to the perpetrators of Quran desecration.

It demanded in a statement that those responsible for this despicable crime should be brought to justice immediately and that urgent measures should be taken to calm the tension in the Muslim world and ensure that such detestable acts are not repeated in the future.