Lawyer worried for Australian Guantanamo inmate

SYDNEY, June 12 (Reuters) The US military lawyer for an Australian man held in Guantanamo Bay for more than four years said he was worried about his client's health after three Arab prisoners at the US facility in Cuba committed suicide.

Major Michael Mori said David Hicks had been held in Guantanamo Bay's Camp Five, where he sat in solitary confinement for up to 22 hours a day for the past three months and was suffering from depression.

''I found him very desperate for human contact. You could just tell when I first got to see him that he was just so hungry to interact with another human being,'' Mori, who visited the camp last week, told Australian Broadcasting Corp. radio.

''He'd lost a lot of weight. I think the loss of weight is part of his loss of appetite just coming on from his depression manifesting itself in that way,'' he said.

Hicks, a Muslim convert, was sent to Guantanamo Bay soon after he was captured by US forces in Afghanistan in November 2001.

He is facing a US Military Commission hearing and has pleaded not guilty to charges of aiding the enemy, attempted murder and conspiracy to commit war crimes.

Mori said the suicides of two Saudis and a Yemeni who hanged themselves with clothes and bedsheets in their cells on Saturday showed how desperate inmates were in the maximum security prison.

''I think it just shows the conditions in Guantanamo and what it can do and the desperation that people can fall to when they're in isolation, or held without any sort of real communication with the outside world,'' Mori said.

The deaths of the three inmates were the first since the United States began sending suspected al Qaeda and Taliban captives to Guantanamo Bay in 2002.

Guantanamo hols about 460 foreigners captured during the US-led war to oust al Qaeda from Afghanistan after the September 11 attacks. Australia is a staunch US ally with troops in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Washington calls the Guantanamo inmates dangerous men who would launch deadly attacks on America and its allies if they were released.

But Britain, Germany and other U.S. allies have joined human rights groups in urging the United States to close the camp.

Australian Prime Minister John Howard, who has been criticised at home for not doing enough to have Hicks tried on Australian soil, said no concerns about Hicks's welfare were raised after consular officials visited him about two weeks ago.

''The report from that consular visit was positive,'' Howard told reporters.

REUTERS MA RAI1027