Book of Obituaries

by Ann Wroe

  He himself, according to his family, was not the least suicidal. He did not wish to die, but to make a statement. Not just ideology lay behind it: a myth had taken hold in Guantánamo that if three prisoners killed themselves, they would all be released. Yet suicide was tricky. Mr Zahrani was not on medication, so he could not hoard pills for an overdose, as some others did. He was not in a cell – as in Camp 5, the new highest-security wing – where fans and electrical fittings could be fashioned into blades. But he had sheets and clothes from which, thread by thread, he could make a rope.

  Since his cell could be easily seen into, discretion was essential. On June 10th, near midnight, he made his bed to look as if he was in it, wrote a suicide note, pushed a wad of cloth into his mouth, then hanged himself among the laundry drying from the ceiling. His colleagues did the same.

  As he had hoped, his death led voices around the world to demand that the camp be closed. One senior American official, immovable, called his suicide “a good PR move”. She may have been right; Guantánamo, alas, remains wrong.

  Picture credits

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