Majeed Abdullah Al Joudi

Majeed Abdullah Al Joudi

A total of 133 Saudi citizens have been held in the Guantanamo Bay detention camps in Cuba.

In addition, a United States citizen, Yaser Esam Hamdi, who was born in Louisiana but moved as a child with his parents to Saudi Arabia, was initially held there. As an American citizen, he was transferred to a military brig on the mainland of the United States. He was transferred to Saudi Arabia after agreeing to renounce his US citizenship.

As of today, eleven Saudi citizens are still held at the detention camp.

Three Saudis: Yasser Talal Al Zahrani, Mani Shaman Turki al-Habardi Al-Utaybi and Abdul Rahman al-Amri, died at Guantanamo during their detention. All were announced by the United States Department of Defense (DOD) as suicides. The first two of these were among three men who died on June 10, 2006; their deaths have been strongly questioned by numerous sources. There are suggestions that they died as a result of torture and government agencies tried to cover this up. Al-Amri died on May 30, 2007 as an apparent suicide.

A total of 778 detainees have been held in the Guantanamo Bay detention camps in Cuba since the camps opened on January 11, 2002. The camp population peaked in 2004 at approximately 660. As of September 2012, 167 detainees remain at Guantanamo.