SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico — A Saudi Arabian detainee died Wednesday at Guantanamo Bay prison and the U.S. military said he apparently committed suicide. Critics of the detention center said the death showed the level of desperation among prisoners.
Also Wednesday, a Canadian detainee fired his American attorneys, leaving him without defense counsel ahead of his trial, his former U.S. military attorney told The Associated Press. The detainee, Omar Khadr, is still to be arraigned and is one of only three of the roughly 380 Guantanamo prisoners to be charged with a crime.
The military did not identify the detainee who died or describe the manner of death. There are about 80 detainees from Saudi Arabia held at Guantanamo. It would be the fourth suicide at Guantanamo since the prison camp opened in January 2002. On June 10, 2006, two Saudi detainees and one Yemeni hanged themselves with sheets.
About 380 men are held at the isolated prison camp on suspicion of links to al-Qaida or the Taliban. Many have been held for five years. The Naval Criminal Investigative Service is conducting an ongoing investigation into the three previous suicides. The former commander of the detention facilities, Navy Rear Adm. Harry Harris, described those suicides as acts of “asymmetric warfare” — an effort to increase condemnation of the prison.
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