…The high degree of surveillance has foiled dozens of previous attempts by prisoners to take their own lives. ‘It happened in front of me several times. The soldiers would see what was happening and they were in the cell in seconds,’ Rasul said. But somehow, in circumstances that the Pentagon has succeeded in keeping totally obscure, late on Friday, 9 June, three detainees, all weak and emaciated after months on hunger strike and being force-fed, managed to tease bedsheets through their cells’ mesh walls, tie them into nooses and hang themselves. With the cells little taller than the height of a man, they stood no chance of breaking their necks: the only way they could die was slowly, by hypoxia.

‘That would take at least four or five minutes, probably longer,’ said Dr David Nicholl, consultant neurologist at Birmingham’s Queen Elizabeth Hospital, who has been co-ordinating international opposition to Guantanamo by physicians. ‘It’s very difficult to see how, if the landing was being properly patrolled, they could have managed to accomplish it.’

…By the time of my own visit in October 2003, a fifth of them were on Prozac and there had been so many suicide attempts – 40 by August 2003 – that the Pentagon had reclassified hangings as ‘manipulative self-injurious behaviours’. Cannily, perhaps, it has refused to give exact statistics on how many SIBs have occurred, claiming that since the reclassification there have been (until last week) only two genuine attempted suicides.

Tarek Dergoul, another freed British former detainee, knew two of the dead men well. ‘I was next to or opposite Manei [Habadi] for weeks, maybe months,’ he said, ‘and like me his morale was high. He was always up for a protest: a hunger strike or a non-co-operation strike. He used to recite poetry, not just Arabic, but English – he knew chunks of Macbeth and he taught me how to read the Koran correctly. When you go through that sort of experience with someone, you really get to know them. I just can’t believe he would take his own life. He would have had to be really desperate.’ Likewise, Dergoul said, Zahrani was ‘a person everyone loved. It’s offensive to me to say he could have killed himself.’ Apart from anything else, all three men would have been deeply aware of Islam’s prohibition of suicide.
guardian.co.uk

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