Remains of three Guantanamo suicides sent home

The remains of three men who committed suicide at the US prison at Guantanamo Bay have been sent home, the Pentagon said.

A commercial charter jet transported the remains from the Navy base in south eastern Cuba to Yemen and Saudi Arabia yesterday, said Defence Department spokesman Lieutenant Commander Jeffrey Gordon.

The men hanged themselves on June 10 in their steel mesh cells at the detention centre where the US holds some 460 men on suspicion of links to al Qaida or the Taliban.

They were the first reported detainee deaths at the prison since it opened in January 2002.

The remains of Ali Abdullah Ahmed, 28, went to his native Yemen while those of Mani Shaman Turki al-Habardi, 30, and Yassar Talal al-Zahrani, 21, were sent to Saudi Arabia.

Funeral rites were administered at Guantanamo by a Muslim imam assisted by Muslim personnel at the base, Gordon said.

The suicides brought renewed scrutiny on Guantanamo and more international pressure to shut it down. The European Union this week renewed its calls for the closure and plans to raise the issue at next week’s EU-US summit.

In Paris, State Department legal adviser John Bellinger said President Bush is not expected to offer a date for closing Guantanamo when he visits Europe next week.

“He’s very aware of the concerns in Europe and elsewhere about Guantanamo, about the damage frankly that it does to the image of the US,” he said.

“The difficulty, frankly though, is the dilemma about what to do with the people who are there. And what is interesting is despite the many voices who have called for the closure of Guantanamo, not one has suggested what should be done with the people who are there,” Bellinger said.

In Yemen, Muslim clerics in Ahmed’s hometown of Taiz told worshippers that he had died a “martyr” and blamed the US.

The lawyer for his family said relatives would refuse to bury the body until the government performed an autopsy and revealed the cause of death.

“We reject the US report and claims of suicide,” the lawyer, Mohammed Nagi Alaw, said.

“For us, the fact is that he was killed by the Americans until proven otherwise,” he added.