Yasser Talal al Zahrani (September 22, 1984 – June 10, 2006) was a citizen of Saudi Arabia who was held in extrajudicial detention in the United States Guantanamo Bay detainment camps, in Cuba.
[3] In 2006, while in detention, he wrote a letter to his father, Colonel Talal al-Zahrani, a former Brigadier General in the Saudi police force,[4] that suggested that two prisoners seemed to be on the verge of death, and that he suspected foul play.
[5] The press, the Saudi government, the detainees' families, and human rights groups have raised serious questions about whether these deaths were suicides or manslaughter due to torture.
These hearings were designed to assess the threat a detainee might pose if released or transferred, and whether there were other factors that warranted his continued detention.
[8] The factors stated: On June 10, 2006, the DoD reported that three Guantanamo detainees: two Saudis and one Yemeni, had committed suicide.
Al Zahrani's father claimed that after his own examination of his son's corpse he was convinced he bore the marks of a beating.
[18] Patrice Mangin, a widely published forensic pathologist, headed the team that volunteered to provide neutral, independent second autopsies for the three dead men.
Mangin asked the DoD to supply his team with Ahmed's throat, and with the bed sheets they claimed had been used to hang the three men.
The Center for the Study of Human Rights at the University of California (Davis) published the official record of Al Zahrani's weigh-in reports.
[20][21] 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.
[5] Yassar Talal al-Zahrani and fellow Saudi Salah Addin Ali Ahmed Al-Salami had habeas corpus petitions filed on their behalf, prior to their deaths.