US: The Pentagon yesterday confirmed a violent uprising at Guantánamo Bay in which four prisoners attempted suicide and guards clashed with inmates armed with sticks, lights and fans.
The clash was the second organised protest by prisoners in less than a year, following last August's mass hunger strike, and was seen by human rights activists as a sign of growing despair among the prison's inmates.
Thursday's unrest at the American naval facility in Guantánamo Bay in Cuba began with suicide attempts by three prisoners who swallowed prescription medicine they had been hoarding, military officials said. Elsewhere, in a section of the prison where inmates are housed in dormitory-type cells, a fourth inmate tried to hang himself.
When guards entered the area, they were set upon by inmates carrying weapons made out of fans, lights and sticks. The revolt was quelled using what the Pentagon described yesterday as "non-lethal force". It said no guards had been injured, and that detainees involved in the clash were moved to a higher security area. The prisoners who had attempted suicide were receiving treatment.
However, the first sketchy details of the incident raised concerns among human rights activists and lawyers for detainees about the increasing despondency of the 460 people held at Guantánamo, who have been detained without trial for more than four years.
There have been at least 39 suicide attempts at the facility since it was opened to house prisoners seized on the battlefields of Afghanistan, and suspected members of al-Qaeda.
One prisoner, Bahraini Juma'a al-Dossari, has made 12 suicide attempts in four years, including one last October during a visit by his attorney, Joshua Colangelo-Bryan. "I saw a pool of blood on the floor in front of me, and then I looked up and saw him hanging from the inside of the steel mesh wall of the cell," Mr Colangelo-Bryan said.
Mr Dossari is known to have made three more suicide attempts since last October. "If you tell people you are going to hold them for the rest of their lives in a place where they have no rights, it can hardly be a surprise that some of them would decide that life is not worth living under those conditions," Mr Colangelo-Bryan said.
Last August, more than 120 prisoners went on hunger strike to protest at their indefinite imprisonment and beatings by the Immediate Response Force squads that are used to put down such protests.
The hunger strike was crushed when the authorities subjected the detainees to violent force-feeding techniques.
Meanwhile, the United Nations yesterday called for Guantánamo to be shut. In an 11-page report, the UN Committee against Torture said it was worried detainees were being held without proper judicial review.