Body of Yemeni Guantanamo detainee arrives home

Jun 5, 2009, 18:12 GMT

Sana'a, Yemen - Yemeni authorities received on Friday the body of a Yemeni detainee who the US military said had killed himself at the Guantanamo Bay prison.

Yemen's Defence Ministry said the body of Muhammad Ahmad Abdallah Saleh al-Hanashi, 31, was transported to Sanaa International Airport on a private US plane.

It said a diplomat form the Yemeni embassy in Washington accompanied the detainee's remains to Sana'a.

The body would be handed over to al-Hanashi's family for burial in his home village in the Wadhea district of the southern province of Abyan, the statement said.

It said the family could choose to have an autopsy performed on the body beforehand.

Al-Hanashi, who had been held at Guantanamo since February 2002, was found 'unresponsive and not breathing' during a routine check late on June 1, the Joint Task Force-Guantanamo said in a statement on the US Southern Command website.

Al-Hanashi was charged with travelling to Afghanistan in 2001 to participate in jihad, and had admitted to fighting alongside the Taliban, according to the US military statement. The military said he had also lived in al-Qaeda guest houses before his capture at Mazar- e-Sharif following the uprising there.

He was the second Yemeni and fifth detainee to die in an apparent suicide at the Guantanamo prison. In 2006, another Yemeni, Saleh Ali Abdullah Ahmed, was found dead and the US military called the death an 'apparent suicide.'

The death of al-Hanashi comes as Yemeni and US authorities are stalled on the fate of Yemeni detainees at the Guantanamo Bay prison.

Hundreds of prisoners have been released from the Guantanamo prison since it was set up in 2002, but only 14 of them were from Yemen.

Around 100 Yemenis are now locked at the controversial prison without charge, making them the largest single group among the 241 prisoners remaining at Guantanamo.

In January, Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh said his country had rejected a US proposal to send 94 Yemeni detainees from Guantanamo to Saudi Arabia, where they could be sent through a rehabilitation programme.

He said the Yemeni government would build a rehabilitation centre, where the returnees would be re-educated to shun extremism and fanaticism.

Last week, dozens of relatives of Yemeni detainees held in Guantanamo protested outside the cabinet's headquarters during its weekly meeting in Sanaa urging the government to step up efforts to secure their release.