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Guantanamo Bay detainee dies in apparent suicide

A Saudi prisoner was found dead in his cell at Guantanamo Bay after apparently taking his own life, the US military said, a possible fourth suicide at the US detention camp that prisoner rights advocates blamed on the US government.

The US military's Southern Command said the detainee was found dead on Wednesday in his cell at the "war on terror" detention center in the US naval base in southeastern Cuba.

"The detainee was pronounced dead by a physician after all lifesaving measures had been exhausted," the US Southern Command said in a statement describing the death as "an apparent suicide."

The US military said an investigation had been launched.

A cultural advisor was assisting the military to ensure that the remains were handled in a culturally sensitive and religiously appropriate manner, the statement said.

Faced with mounting calls at home and abroad for the camp to be shut down, Southern Command said that "the mission of detention and interrogation at Guantanamo continues."

"This mission is vital to the security of our nation and our allies and is being carried out professionally and humanely by the men and women of Joint Task Force Guantanamo," it said.

The Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), a US legal rights group that represents detainees being held without charge, blamed the US government for the Saudi prisoner's death.

"The United States government is responsible for this man's death and must be held accountable," Wells Dixon, staff attorney for CCR's Guantanamo Global Justice Initiative, said in a statement.

"The military has increasingly held people in solitary confinement and continued to refuse to allow independent psychological evaluations," Dixon said.

"By refusing to hear the men's cases or exercise any oversight of their conditions, the judiciary contributed further to the desperation of the detainees and Congress, in failing to restore the fundamental right of habeas corpus, dealt the final blow," he said.

CCR said that the US government has provided "extremely limited" information to the families and lawyers of dead detainees and challenged an attempt to preserve evidence related to the deaths.

In June last year, two Saudis and a Yemeni hanged themselves with sheets at the camp.

US officials had stirred worldwide outrage at the time by describing those suicides as "an act of asymmetric warfare" and "a good PR move" on the part of terror suspects.

Human rights groups say there have been dozens more suicide attempts by detainees, many of whom are held in isolation.

Last month the US Navy said 13 detainees who staged a hunger strike were force-fed through tubes.

Navy Commander Robert Durand described the hunger strike as "a tactic taught in the al-Qaeda training manual ... designed to elicit maximum media attention."

The detention camp is located on a sprawling US Navy base in southeastern Cuba.

In all, about 800 prisoners have passed through the camp since it opened. Around 380 inmates are still held at the navy base, some having spent as long as five years there without being charged.
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