Cuba, June 15: Families of two detainees who died at Guantanamo Bay in 2006 say the prisoners were tortured to death, challenging Washington’s claim that they committed suicide.
Relatives of Saudi national Yasser al-Zahrani and Yemeni Salah al-Salami have demanded a federal appeals court reconsider their cases claiming they have new information backing up their case including direct eyewitness accounts from four US military guards.
“They have direct eyewitness accounts of a cover-up of the actual circumstances of the deaths” their attorney, Padriss Kebriaei said, according to AFP.
At the time of their death, Al-Zahrani, 21, and Al-Salami, 33, had been held in custody without charge, detained incommunicado for about four years at Guantanamo Bay.
The Pentagon says the two men, along with another individual that his family has not filed a complaint, committed suicide by hanging themselves in their own cells.
However, Joe Hickman, a US soldier that was on guard at the night of their death claims that he had seen the three prisoners being transferred to another facility known as “Camp No.”
“Guards nicknamed the facility ‘Camp No’ because anyone who asked if it existed would be told, ‘No, it doesn’t,'” the families’ petition said.
The accounts indicate that the men were killed either by accident or during torture sessions at a remote facility outside the main compound.
A medical examination has confirmed signs of torture on the body of one of the inmates.
The US invaded Afghanistan in 2001 with the claimed goal of flushing out the al-Qaeda group. Many people were arrested and tried in Guantanamo prison without clear charges since it opened in 2002.
——–Agencies