As if the international pressure on the United States to close the detention facility at Guantanamo wasn't great enough, three inmate suicides over the weekend promise to ratchet it up.

The US Defense Department released details of the three men who hanged themselves in custody at Guantánamo Bay on Saturday, and the BBC reported that one of the men didn't know he was about to be sent home for trial in Saudi Arabia. German government officials on Sunday renewed calls for the prison to be closed.

Mani Shaman Turki al-Habardi Al-Utaybi, 30, was a Saudi Arabian belonging to a "second-tier militant group" with links to Al-Qaida, according to Navy Commander Robert Durand, the prison's spokesman. Al-Utaybi was due to be transferred to detention in Saudi Arabia, but none of the 141 prisoners cleared for release from Guantánamo had been informed of their status.

The other two suicides were identified as Yassar Talal Al-Zahrani, a 21-year-old Taliban fighter who would have been a juvenile when he was captured; and Ali Abdullah Ahmed, a Yemeni who had "key links to principal Al-Qaida facilitators and senior membership," according to Durand.

All three men were found dead on Saturday morning in their metal mesh cells, hanging from nooses fashioned from bedsheets or cotton prison clothes. There were suicide notes, officials have said, but the contents weren't released.

"These developments support doubts about the prison's right to exist," Peter Struck told Germany's Bild Zeitung over the weekend. Struck is the parliamentary leader of Germany's Social Democrats, but the feeling is bipartisan: German Chancellor Angela Merkel, a conservative Christian Democrat, called for the prison to close last January.

"A good PR move"

Some US officials deflected the rising chorus of criticism. Rear Admiral Harry Harris, the camp's commander, said the prisoners had "no regard to life, neither ours nor their own. And I believe this was not an act of desperation, rather an act of asymmetric warfare waged against the US."

Colleen Graffy, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy, said the suicides were "a good PR move to draw attention" to the plight of Guantánamo prisoners.

Last Friday President Bush said he would like to empty the prison -- which in most cases would mean sending inmates to the US or to their home countries to face trial -- but he worried that letting prisoners go would let them "create grave harm." Washington officially calls the inmates "enemy combatants," not protected by the Geneva Convention which governs the treatment of prisoners of war.

The Bush Administration has long been under pressure to close the four-and-a-half-year-old detention center. Some of the remaining 460 inmates are still being detained on the "flimsiest of hearsay," said Senator Arlen Specter, a Republican who says the contravention of basic legal rights at Guantánamo has become a liability. "Where we have evidence, they ought to be tried," Specter told CNN, "and if convicted they ought to be sentenced."

The suicides brought fresh criticism this weekend from England and Denmark -- both allies of the US in the Iraq war -- as well as Sweden and Saudi Arabia. "Each Saudi has to be brought home where he can face up to charges he is accused of based on our laws and regulations," a Saudi Interior Ministry spokesman told Reuters.

"If it is perfectly legal and there is nothing going wrong there, why don't they have (the camp) in America?" Harriet Harman, Britain's Minister for Constitutional Affairs, said to the Telegraph in the UK.

A total of 759 prisoners have been held at Guantánamo since it opened in early 2002, but the number has declined to 465. Only 10 inmates have been charged of any crime. A British citizen who spent two years there and has since lodged a lawsuit against the US Defense Department for "torture" during his incarceration said the suicides were no surprise.

"Killing yourself is not something that is looked at lightly in Islam," said Shafiq Rasul, "but if you're told day after day by the Americans that you're never going to go home or you're put into isolation, these acts are committed simply out of desperation and loss of hope."