Washington – Three detainees at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, concealed themselves in their cells to prevent guards from seeing them commit suicide, an official said Sunday.
One of the prisoners hanged himself behind laundry drying from the ceiling of the cell and had arranged his bed to make it look as if he was still sleeping, according to Lt. Cmdr. Robert Durand. The other two who committed suicide also took steps to prevent guards from seeing that they had put nooses around their necks, he said.
The deception by the prisoners raises questions about how long it took military guards to discover the suicides. Military officials said one focus of an investigation into the suicides would be the need for procedural changes, such as barring prisoners from doing laundry in their cells.
Gen. Bantz Craddock, who oversees Guantanamo as head of the Southern Command, told reporters Sunday that the investigation into the deaths “kind of boils down to two things: Are the procedures that you have in place adequate, and then were the procedures followed to the standards?”
The Pentagon identified the three detainees as two Saudis, Mani bin Shaman bin Turki al-Habardi, 30, and Yasser Talal Abdulah Yahya al-Zahrani, 22, and a 33-year- old Yemeni named Ali Abdullah Ahmed.
White House officials on Sunday described the men as committed terrorists, and military officials said none of them had been among the handful of prisoners whose cases have been brought before military commissions for prosecution.
The Pentagon released a statement describing Ahmed, the Yemeni, as a “mid to high-level al-Qaeda operative,” and al-Ha bardi as a member of a terrorist group that recruits for al-Qaeda, who had been recommended for transfer to another country, presumably Saudi Arabia. The Pentagon said al-Zahrani was “a frontline fighter for the Taliban” who participated in the prison uprising at Mazar-e-Sharif in Afghanistan that resulted in the death of a CIA operative.
Military officials said they had translated notes left by the prisoners, but the officials refused to describe the contents of the messages. All three men were in the same cell block in 6-by-8-foot cells that were not adjoining but had wire-mesh walls, officials said.
Jennifer Daskal, advocacy director for Human Rights Watch, said Sunday the three suicides “are an indication of the incredible despair that the prisoners are experiencing” after many of them have been “completely cut off from the world” for as long as 4 1/2 years.
Guards will now collect bed linens every morning to prevent prisoners from secretly making nooses, Durand said.
Though the Bush administration has been under pressure – from the United Nations, European countries and the Red Cross – about the Guantanamo detention center, White House officials did not indicate that they viewed the suicides as a major political problem.