3 Gitmo detainees commit suicide

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico — Three detainees at U.S. Naval Base Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, hanged themselves with nooses made of sheets and clothes, the commander of the detention center said yesterday. They were the first reported deaths among the hundreds of men held at the base for years without charge.

The suicides, which military officials said were coordinated, triggered further condemnation of the isolated detention center, which holds some 460 men on suspicion of links to al Qaeda and the Taliban. Only 10 have been charged with crimes, and there has been growing international pressure on the United States to close the prison.

Two men from Saudi Arabia and one from Yemen were found dead shortly after midnight yesterday in separate cells, said the Miami-based U.S. Southern Command, which has jurisdiction over the prison. Attempts were made to revive them, but they failed.

“They hung themselves with fabricated nooses made out of clothes and bedsheets,” Navy Rear Adm. Harry Harris told reporters in a conference call from the U.S. base in southeastern Cuba.

The suicides were “not an act of desperation” but “an act of asymmetric warfare,” he said.

To help prevent more suicides, guards will now give bedsheets to detainees only when they go to bed and remove them after they wake up in the morning, Adm. Harris said.

Gen. John Craddock, commander of the U.S. Southern Command, said in the conference call that the three had left suicide notes, but he refused to disclose the contents.

One of the detainees was a mid- or high-level al Qaeda operative, Adm. Harris said, while another had been captured in Afghanistan and participated in a riot at a prison there. The third belonged to a splinter group. Their names were not released.

“They’re determined, intelligent, committed elements, and they continue to do everything they can … to become martyrs in the jihad,” Gen. Craddock said.

He said all three had engaged in a hunger strike to protest their indefinite incarceration and had been force-fed before quitting the protest action. Military commanders said two were participating in the hunger strike as recently as last month, and described one of them as a long-term hunger striker who had begun the protest late last year and ended it in May.

Some detainees have been on a hunger strike since August. The number of inmates refusing food dropped to 18 by last weekend from a high of 131.

President Bush, who was spending the weekend at Camp David, expressed “serious concern” about the incident, White House press secretary Tony Snow said.

His immediate concerns were making sure that an investigation was being conducted and that the bodies were “treated humanely and with cultural sensitivity,” Mr. Snow said.

In a sign of concern over the diplomatic fallout, the administration conducted an extraordinary round of global outreach within hours. Among those contacted were the United Nations, European Union member states and Middle Eastern embassies, Mr. Snow said.

Amnesty International said the apparent suicides “are the tragic results of years of arbitrary and indefinite detention” and called the prison “an indictment” of the Bush administration’s human rights record.

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