A Guantanamo detainee has died in what the military are calling an “apparent suicide” — and civil liberties groups are calling for action.
Guards found 31-year-old Muhammad Ahmad Abdallah Salih, known as Al-Hanashi, unresponsive and not breathing in his cell Monday night, U.S. military officials announced, according to the AP.
Al-Hanashi, a Yemeni, had been held without charge at Gitmo since February 2002. Medical records released previously indicate that at one stage he joined a long-running hunger strike to protest his confinement. In December 2005, he weighed about 86 pounds.
The ACLU called in a press release for a “full and transparent investigation” into the circumstances surrounding Al-Hanashi’s death. And the Center for Constitutional Rights demanded that Gitmo be closed, asserting in a press release that “conditions at the prison have not improved.”
This is the fifth apparent suicide at Guantanamo.*
* This sentence has been corrected from an earlier version.