Mani Shaman Turki al-Habardi Al-Utaybi

Mani Shaman Turki al-Habardi Al-Utaybi (1976 – June 10, 2006) was a citizen of Saudi Arabia, who was arrested in 2001 in Pakistan and held in extrajudicial detention in the United States Guantanamo Bay detainment camps, in Cuba from early 2002. Al-Utaybi died in custody on June 10, 2006. The Department of Defense reported his death and those of two other detainees the same day as suicides.

There were questions at the time about the conclusions, and each of the men's families disputed these. In 2009 Seton Hall University Law School published a report noting inconsistencies in the DOD account and questioning its conclusions. In January 2010, Harper's Magazine carried an article by Scott Horton that contended DOD had carried out a cover-up and that the detainees had died in the course of or due to severe interrogation at a black site known as "Camp No". The account was based on the testimony of four soldiers who had been serving at Delta Camp at the time.

Background Mani Shaman Turki al-Habardi Al-Utaybi was born in 1976 in Al Qarara, Saudi Arabia. He was orphaned early and grew up with his uncle and cousins in Dawadmi. He was treated as an enemy combatant and transported to the Guantanamo Bay detention camp.

Death in custody

On June 10, 2006, the Department of Defense reported that three Guantanamo detainees: two Saudis, and one Yemeni, had committed suicide. DOD spokesmen refrained from releasing the dead men's identities.

On June 11, 2006, Saudi authorities released the names of the two Saudi men. The Washington Post reported in 2006 after the deaths that Al-Utaybi had been recommended for "transfer" to another country, which meant he would have been continued to be held in guarded detention. The DOD did not state to which country he would have been transferred. However, they said he would have continued to have been held in detention. The Washington Post reported: "Lieutenant Commander Robert Durand, a spokesman for the Guantanamo detention center, said he did not know whether al-Utaybi had been informed about the transfer recommendation before he killed himself." A memoir published in 2008 by Murat Kurnaz, a former detainee, said that al-Utaybi did know and was looking forward to leaving Guantanamo.

Legal representation

The DoD had initially told the press that none of the three men who killed themselves had legal representation, or had filed habeas applications. One of the lawyers who volunteered to be part of al-Utaybi's legal team, disputed this.

Missing organs The Department of Defense returned the dead men's bodies to their families in mid-June, after al-Utaybi's family openly questioned the claims he'd committed suicide and requested his body for a second autopsy. Utaybi's family reported that the Saudi post-mortem had found that the DOD had retained his brain, heart, liver and kidneys. Each of the families had second autopsies done, but these were inconclusive. In each case, the US had kept organs of the throat, so pathology teams could not tell if the men had died by hanging or not.

NCIS Report On August 23, 2008, Josh White, writing in the Washington Post, reported the paper had received 3,000 pages of documents arising from the NCIS investigation through Freedom of Information Act requests. It was the fifteenth report on Guantanamo published by the center, which has done analyses based on government data.