Gitmo Riot Started Over Korans

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SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico – A Guantanamo Bay detainee who participated in a clash with U.S. military guards last month said it was sparked when guards tried to search prisoners’ Korans, contradicting the military’s account of the melee, his defense attorney said yesterday.

The detainee also denied the contention by military officials that prisoners in the May 18 clash in Guantanamo Bay lured guards into a cell by staging a suicide attempt, the defense attorney, Kristin Wilhelm, told the Associated Press.

The military, in its account soon after the clash occurred at the prison in southeast Cuba, said 10 prisoners used makeshift weapons to battle 10 guards. It was one of the most violent incidents at Guantanamo Bay, where America holds about 460 men on suspicion of links to Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

Ms. Wilhelm said the detainee, a Yemeni whom she could not identify further because of Pentagon rules, told her the guards demanded that prisoners turn over their Korans so they could be searched for hoarded medicine, which the military said had been used in two suicide attempts earlier in the day elsewhere at the prison camp.

One detainee offered to collect the Korans and search them in front of the guards, but the military guards refused and entered the cell block, setting off the fight, she said. She said the prisoners used only a floor lamp against the guards and that it quickly ended when one detainee succumbed to pepper spray used by military police.

“There was no mention of a suicide attempt and there was no mention of luring a guard into the cell block,” the attorney said of her conversations with her detainee client.

Ms. Wilhelm and another lawyer from her firm, John Chandler, met with the detainee on May 26. Their notes from the meeting were declassified by the military yesterday.


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