A 48-year-old ex-Taliban commander dropped dead of an apparent heart attack after exercising on an elliptical machine inside Guantánamo's most populous prison camp, the military said Thursday.
The dead man, Awal Gul, had been in U.S. custody since Christmas 2001 and at the prison camps in southeast Cuba for more than eight years. He was designated by the Obama administration as one of 48 ``indefinite detainees,'' meaning the U.S. would neither repatriate him nor put him on trial.
Gul was working out Tuesday night in a collective cellblock at the cement penitentiary-style building called Camp 6, said Navy Cmdr. Tamsen Reese, a prison camps spokeswoman.
``He went to go take a shower and apparently collapsed in the shower,'' Reese said. ``Detainees on the cellblock then assisted him in getting to the guard station.''
From there he was taken to a prison camp clinic, then to the Navy base hospital, some miles away, but could not be saved despite what the commander called ``extensive life saving measures.''
Gul is the seventh war-on-terror detainee to die during the nine years the Pentagon has confined some 800 men and boys to the prisons at Guantánamo. Gul had never been charged with a crime during his more-than-eight-year detention as a suspected base commander for the Taliban.
Significant shortages of bread and essential supplies, including food and fuel, have returned to the Gaza...
On September 25, 2025, David McIntosh filed a report to his bosses at Safe Reach Solutions...
The struggle over a fallen police barrier lasted less than a minute, but it has forever...
The report, seen exclusively by Middle East Eye, is based on testimonies from Palestinian former prisoners...
