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San Juan, Puerto Rico: After almost three years of a hunger strike and force-feeding at Guantanamo, a Saudi detainee said he will persist with his protest until he sets foot in his native land.
Legal papers obtained last week give the first detailed look at Ahmad Zaid Salem Zuhair since he was captured in Pakistan and taken to Guantanamo in 2002. The US military calls him an enemy combatant, an allegation he denies.
"He looks extremely skinny, just like you would expect someone to look who has been on hunger strike for three years," Ramzi Kassem, part of a Yale Law School legal team representing Zuhair, who visited him this month.
"There was no meat on his bones." Zuhair and another long-term hunger striker, Abdul Rahman Shalabi, are the hard-core members of a mass protest that began in the summer of 2005 at Guantanamo Bay Naval base in Cuba, where the US now holds about 270 men on suspicion of terrorism or links to Al Qaida and the Taliban.
The US military says two men have been on hunger strike since August 2005, but has not named them. Lawyers have identified them as Zuhair and Shalabi.
At its peak, 131 prisoners were on strike, but that number dropped sharply after the military began force-feeding them. It dwindled further after Guantanamo authorities began using a special padded restraint chair during the feedings.
Zuhair says he has been wrongfully imprisoned at the US Navy base in southeast Cuba and should be returned to his country.
"This injustice will only end when I leave this island. Only then will I end my strike," a petition filed Monday in a federal court in Washington quotes Zuhair as saying. His lawyers said he vowed to maintain the strike until he returns to Saudi Arabia.
He also asks the judge to prevent the US from sending him to any third country, as has been done with some Guantanamo prisoners, and that he be allowed to call his family.
Challenge
As of Thursday, there were seven men on hunger strike and none was in immediate medical danger, said Navy Commander Pauline Storum, a spokes-woman for the detention centre. Storum said six of the strikers were being "enterally fed," the military term for force-feeding liquid nutrients through a flexible tube inserted into a nostril.
Military records show that Zuhair is about 5 feet 5 inches tall, and Kassem said he appeared to weigh between 130 and 135 pounds [59 and 61 kilograms] when they met earlier this month.
Zuhair's lawyers filed their petition this week, hoping the US Supreme Court will soon overturn a 2006 law that stripped Guantanamo prisoners of the right to challenge their detentions in US courts.
A Supreme Court ruling on their right to come before a judge is expected by June 30.
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