Sunday 7 June 2009

Guantanamo detainee buried in home village





Guantanamo detainee buried in home village
By Nasser Arrabyee/06/06/2009


The remains of a Yemeni Guantanamo detainee was buried in his family's village at Al Wadhi in Abyan province, south of Yemen, sources close to the family said Saturday.

The remains of the 31-year-old Muhammad Ahmad Abdullah Salih, Al Hanashi, had arrived Yemen early Friday in an American plane accompanied by Khaled Al Kathairi, the political attaché at the Yemeni embassy in Washington.

Earlier, the military sources said Al Hanashi was found unresponsive inside his cell last Monday, in an apparent suicide-committing.

Al Hanashi, is the second Yemeni detainee to be handed as a dead body after Salah Al Salami. And he is the fifth suicide reported at Guantanamo Bay since the prison was opened in January 2002. Al Hanashi went to Afghanistan to fight with Taliban early 2001 and was held 2002.

"It seems that our government refuses to receive its men from Guantanamo alive, and it wants only to receive them dead," said the lawyer and human right activist, Khaled Al Ansi.

Al Ansi who is also Executive Director of the Yemeni Organization for Defending Rights and Liberties (HOOD) was skeptical about the suicide allegations of Al Hanashi.

"There is a lot of a doubt about the American allegations that this man committed suicide, because they did not investigate into the previous case until now of the Salah Al Salmi who was handed over as dead body also," He said.

The official of HOOD, the organization that has been demanding the release of the approximate 100 Yemeni detainees since 2004, held the American government responsible for the lives of the detainees.

"The American government is fully responsible for the detainees and their lives, I would only say they were either killed or pushed to kill themselves," He said.

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