US: Ahmed Ali Abdullah’s death in detention at the Guantanamo Bay camps
29 May 2007
Alkarama for Human Rights has referred the case of Ahmed Ali Abdullah, a Yemeni national born 9 March 1969 and detained at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp from 2002 until his death, to the UN Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial Executions.
Mr. Ahmed Ali Abdullah died on 10 June 2006 at the same time as two other detainees of Saudi nationality, Mr. Yassir Talal az-Zahrani and Mr. Mani’ Shaman al-Utaybi. The American authorities have stated that these three detainees committed suicide.
Mr. Ahmed Ali Abdullah died on 10 June 2006 at the same time as two other detainees of Saudi nationality, Mr. Yassir Talal az-Zahrani and Mr. Mani’ Shaman al-Utaybi. The American authorities have stated that these three detainees committed suicide.
The three victims’ bodies were autopsied inside the camp by a medical team led by Dr. Craig T. Mallak, and were then repatriated and sent back to the authorities of their respective countries.
Ahmed Ali Abdullah’s family asked Alkarama to help them organise an autopsy of their son’s body. The organisation commissioned a medical team headed by Prof. Patrice Mangin, director of the University of Lausanne’s Institute of Legal Medicine. The autopsy was performed on 21 June 2006 at the Sanaa Military Hospital in Yemen. After further toxicological analyses at Lausanne of some samples taken from the victim’s body, a medico-legal report on the autopsy was provided to Alkarama.
It emerges from the autopsy report that the Swiss medical team was unable to reach a definite conclusion about the cause of Mr. Ahmed Ali Abdulllah’s death without getting the information it asked for from the military medical team that had carried out the first autopsy of the body. In particular, it is essential to obtain the US autopsy report and the report of the inquiry set up by the Guantanamo Bay detention camp authorities. The American authorities were asked to provide this information on 29 June 2006, but to this day have not replied.
A second autopsy of the bodies of Mr. Yassir Talal az-Zahrani and Mr. Mani’ Shaman al-Utaybi was carried out by a Saudi medical team led by Dr. Said Gharamallah Alghamdi, head of the Legal Medicine Centre in Riyad. It put together a list of seven questions addressed to the American authorities through the Saudi Minister of the Interior.
In the absence of the details requested from the American authorities, the report on the medical team’s autopsy of Mr. Abdullah makes a certain number of points:
a) The groove on the victim’s neck, as photographs clearly show, does not support the thesis advanced by the American authorities that the victim hung himself with a sheet or with clothes.
b) The presence of traces of injection on the body, and the fact that the ends of all the fingernails and toes had been cut.
c) The American authorities’ keeping of anatomical bits corresponding to the upper airways including the larynx, the hyoid bone and the thyroid cartilage removed as a block, which constitute the centrepiece in a case of suicide by hanging. Note also that the same anatomical bits were kept in the cases of Mr. Yassir Talal az-Zahrani and Mani’ Shaman al-Utaybi.
d) The dental trauma observed during the autopsy and described by the Swiss medical team as “a suspicious factor with regards to the circumstances of death”.
The investigations undertaken by Alkarama on behalf of the deceased detainees’ parents as well as the ex-Guantanamo detainees who knew the victims give little reason to credit the claim that the Guantanamo detainees committed suicide. To the contrary, many indicators suggest that their death was not the result of suicide.
- The fact that the three “suicides”, committed by people known for their strict adherence to the precepts of Islam, which absolutely forbids this act, and also known for their resistance to the Guantanamo Bay camp administration, took place at the same time.
- The permanent close surveillance of the detainees by guards and video-cameras rules out the possibility of a suicide in such a limited time period: numerous ex-detainees report that the guards pass each detention cell in the Guantanamo Bay camp every two to five minutes at most.
- Finally, all the detainees contacted testify to the material impossibility of hanging oneself in a cell, whose ceiling has no place to attach a rope or other tie.
In light of the American authorities’ refusal to shed light on Ali Abdullah Ahmed’s death by providing the requested explanations, Alkarama for Human Rights requests the intervention of the Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial Executions regarding the US authorities to have the latter respond to the Swiss medical team’s questions and provide the requested information along with a copy of the American medical team at Guantanamo Bay’s autopsy report.
Ahmed Ali Abdullah’s family asked Alkarama to help them organise an autopsy of their son’s body. The organisation commissioned a medical team headed by Prof. Patrice Mangin, director of the University of Lausanne’s Institute of Legal Medicine. The autopsy was performed on 21 June 2006 at the Sanaa Military Hospital in Yemen. After further toxicological analyses at Lausanne of some samples taken from the victim’s body, a medico-legal report on the autopsy was provided to Alkarama.
It emerges from the autopsy report that the Swiss medical team was unable to reach a definite conclusion about the cause of Mr. Ahmed Ali Abdulllah’s death without getting the information it asked for from the military medical team that had carried out the first autopsy of the body. In particular, it is essential to obtain the US autopsy report and the report of the inquiry set up by the Guantanamo Bay detention camp authorities. The American authorities were asked to provide this information on 29 June 2006, but to this day have not replied.
A second autopsy of the bodies of Mr. Yassir Talal az-Zahrani and Mr. Mani’ Shaman al-Utaybi was carried out by a Saudi medical team led by Dr. Said Gharamallah Alghamdi, head of the Legal Medicine Centre in Riyad. It put together a list of seven questions addressed to the American authorities through the Saudi Minister of the Interior.
In the absence of the details requested from the American authorities, the report on the medical team’s autopsy of Mr. Abdullah makes a certain number of points:
a) The groove on the victim’s neck, as photographs clearly show, does not support the thesis advanced by the American authorities that the victim hung himself with a sheet or with clothes.
b) The presence of traces of injection on the body, and the fact that the ends of all the fingernails and toes had been cut.
c) The American authorities’ keeping of anatomical bits corresponding to the upper airways including the larynx, the hyoid bone and the thyroid cartilage removed as a block, which constitute the centrepiece in a case of suicide by hanging. Note also that the same anatomical bits were kept in the cases of Mr. Yassir Talal az-Zahrani and Mani’ Shaman al-Utaybi.
d) The dental trauma observed during the autopsy and described by the Swiss medical team as “a suspicious factor with regards to the circumstances of death”.
The investigations undertaken by Alkarama on behalf of the deceased detainees’ parents as well as the ex-Guantanamo detainees who knew the victims give little reason to credit the claim that the Guantanamo detainees committed suicide. To the contrary, many indicators suggest that their death was not the result of suicide.
- The fact that the three “suicides”, committed by people known for their strict adherence to the precepts of Islam, which absolutely forbids this act, and also known for their resistance to the Guantanamo Bay camp administration, took place at the same time.
- The permanent close surveillance of the detainees by guards and video-cameras rules out the possibility of a suicide in such a limited time period: numerous ex-detainees report that the guards pass each detention cell in the Guantanamo Bay camp every two to five minutes at most.
- Finally, all the detainees contacted testify to the material impossibility of hanging oneself in a cell, whose ceiling has no place to attach a rope or other tie.
In light of the American authorities’ refusal to shed light on Ali Abdullah Ahmed’s death by providing the requested explanations, Alkarama for Human Rights requests the intervention of the Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial Executions regarding the US authorities to have the latter respond to the Swiss medical team’s questions and provide the requested information along with a copy of the American medical team at Guantanamo Bay’s autopsy report.