The European Union today stepped up its call for the closure of Guantanamo Bay today in the wake of the suicides of three inmates.

"Guantanamo should be closed. This is an occasion to reiterate that statement," said the EU's External Relations Commissioner, Benita Ferrero-Waldner, at a meeting of foreign ministers in Luxembourg.

Ms Ferrero-Waldner's comment came after a weekend of renewed criticism of the prison camp from American politicians in both parties and the British Constitutional Affairs Minister, Harriet Harman.

Manfred Nowak, the UN Rapporteur on Torture, suggested today that an EU-US summit on June 21 provide an opportunity for European leaders to make a formal request for the facility's closure.

International unease at the conditions in the detention centre, which holds around 465 terror suspects from 40 countries, has been exacerbated by Colleen Graffy, the US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for public diplomacy, who dismissed the suicides as "a good PR move".

As an American military investigation into the deaths began, the prisoners were named by the Pentagon as Mani bin Shaman bin Turki al-Habardi, 30, and Yasser Talal Abdulah Yahya al-Zahrani, 22, both from Saudi Arabia, and Ali Abdullah Ahmed, 33, of Yemen.

According to the US military, Ahmed, the Yemeni, was a "mid to high-level Al Qaeda operative", while Habardi was a recruiter for jihad. Zahrani, who was detained in Afghanistan when he was 17, was described as "a frontline fighter for the Taleban" who had taken part in a prison uprising in 2001 after his capture.

The New York Times reported that the three inmates, the first to commit suicide in the prison since it opened in 2002, hanged themselves with clothes and sheets, and used other laundry as curtains to block the guards' view into their cages.

Quoting Lieutenant Commander Robert T Durand of the US Navy, the newspaper said one of the men disguised his bed to appear as if he was sleeping in it. "The deception by the prisoners raises questions about how long it took military guards to discover the bodies. Regulations at Guantánamo call for guards to check on each inmate every two minutes," the newspaper reported.

But relatives of the two Saudi detainees insisted that the inmates would not have taken their own lives because they were strict Muslims.

"I am confident my son did not commit suicide," Talal al-Zahrani, al-Zahrani's father told the Asharq al-Awsat newspaper in Riyadh. "The story of the US administration is a lie."

Fares al-Habardi, the brother of al-Habardi, also doubted the US account: "We are 100 percent suspicious about his death," he said.

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