Yemeni man dies in Guantanamo prison - San Francisco Chronicle

Washington --

The detainee who died Saturday at the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was a Yemeni man who had been ordered freed in 2010 by a federal district court judge but remained in captivity after the ruling was overturned by the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington last year.

The military Tuesday publicly identified the detainee, whose death was announced a day earlier, as Adnan Farhan Abdul Latif. He was captured at the Afghanistan-Pakistan border in December 2001 and was among the first detainees taken to the prison when the Bush administration opened it in January 2002.

Latif was found unresponsive in his cell and could not be revived, the military has said. An autopsy was performed, but the Naval Criminal Investigative Service has not yet made public its findings about how he died. The U.S. Southern Command, which oversees Guantanamo, is also conducting an investigation into the death.

Latif was a former hunger striker who was in the "disciplinary" lockup for throwing bodily fluids on guards. He also had a history of depression and erratic behavior, including an episode in 2009 in which he threw his blood onto his volunteer lawyer, David Remes.

Remes described Latif as a "talented poet and deeply devout" man who was "mentally fragile and was at times sedated, placed on suicide watch and sent to the prison's psychological ward."

Latif traveled from Yemen to Pakistan in August 2001 and later made his way to Afghanistan before trying to flee once the war began.

He said he was sent to the region by a humanitarian aid worker to seek charitable medical treatment for problems stemming from a head injury he had suffered in a car accident in 1994. The military instead maintained that he had been recruited by an al Qaeda figure to help the Taliban fight the Northern Alliance.

Latif was the ninth detainee known to have died at Guantanamo.