THREE detainees at the US navy base on Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, killed themselves yesterday in an apparent suicide pact, marking the first deaths in custody at the military prison.

The prisoners, who have yet to be named, hanged themselves in their cells with nooses made from clothes and bedsheets. Two were from Saudi Arabia and one from Yemen. All three were former hunger-strikers who had been force-fed.

President George W Bush expressed “serious concern” about their deaths, but Rear Admiral Harry Harris, commander of the Joint Task Force Guantanamo, said the men were dedicated terrorists and jihadists. “This was not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetric warfare committed against us.”

The detainees were discovered shortly after midnight. They were “unresponsive and not breathing”, according to US Southern Command. Attempts to revive them failed.

Rumours had been rampant among the prisoners, according to Harris, that “three detainees must die” before they could go home.

The inmates’ isolation from the world was highlighted when General John Craddock of US Southern Command said the suicide pact was unrelated to the killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian terrorist, because the detainees had not heard about his death.

The American prison facility, which holds about 460 terror suspects, has experienced considerable unrest in the past year, as detainees have gone on hunger strike to protest about their indefinite incarceration without the rights of prisoners of war under the Geneva convention.

Last month a detainee faked a suicide attempt to lure guards to a cell block where prisoners were waiting to ambush them with makeshift weapons.

Moazzam Begg, 37, a British Muslim who spent two years at Guantanamo before being released last year, said last night: “It’s just awful. I hope the Bush administration will finally see this is wrong.”

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