GUANTANAMO BAY NAVY BASE, Cuba -- A lawyer for a Saudi captive here, who was once suspected of being the 9/11 ''20th hijacker,'' said Tuesday that the detainee tried to kill himself last month in despair over hearing a prosecutor was seeking his execution.

Mohammed al Qahtani, 29, cut himself repeatedly and had to be hospitalized at the prison camps here, according to attorney Gitanjali Gutierrez of the New York Center for Constitutional Rights.

Qahtani was upset to learn that a Pentagon prosecutor had sworn out capital criminal charges against him, alleging he was a co-conspirator in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, she said.

''He definitely thinks it's serious, and the United States is trying to kill him. He was terrified,'' Gutierrez said by telephone Tuesday.

Some U.S. officials, among them U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey, have expressed concern that a true al Qaeda jihadist would welcome a U.S. military execution as a fast track to martyrdom.

In contrast, she noted, ``He does not want to be a martyr.''

Qahtani no longer faces those charges, and Gutierrez had Pentagon permission to visit this remote base Wednesday to tell him so.

On May 9, a Pentagon official, without explanation, struck Qahtani's name from the upcoming military commissions trial of alleged 9/11 architects. Now five men face possible death sentences, if convicted in the sweeping conspiracy case -- chief among them reputed al Qaeda kingpin Khalid Sheik Mohammed.

A prison camps official declined to describe Qahtani's current condition, or confirm the defense attorney's account.

''We don't discuss specific conditions of individual detainees to respect their privacy,'' said Navy Cmdr. Pauline Storum, the detention center spokeswoman.

Prison camp commanders have said they take away the clothing of detainees who threaten serious self harm and dress them instead in a velcro-and-polyester, tear-proof ``suicide smock.''

Four detainees have hanged themselves, three in June 2006, in what the Pentagon calls ''apparent suicides.'' The Navy has an open investigation of those deaths.

The United States had in the past suspected that Qahtani had tried to join the 9/11 hijackers.

U.S. immigration officers at the Orlando airport had refused Qahtani entry into the country in the summer of 2001. After his capture in the war-on-terror and transfer to the Cuba base, then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld approved a special military interrogation regime for Qahtani.

His November-December 2002 interrogations were a focus of a massive 430-page internal Department of Justice investigation of war-on-terror interrogations, which was partially made public on Tuesday.

U.S. military interrogators used sleep deprivation and left him naked or strapped to an intravenous drip without bathroom breaks to get him to confess.

They also brought a snarling dog to his interrogation cell in what the report called ``exclusively the military's idea, based on their belief that Arabs feared dogs because they viewed dogs as unclean.''

Qahtani has since recanted his confessions, his lawyer said, on grounds he told them what they wanted to hear because he was being tortured.

Gutierrez discovered the suicide attempts in April during a recent lawyer-client meeting, she said. He had cut his arm three times, once requiring stitches and hospitalization.

He also tried to slit his wrist and cut the top of his hands, she said.

Moreover, she said, prior to April the client had never expressed hopelessness, had not gone on hunger strikes and had been largely lucid.

''He has really, really tried to survive Guantánamo,'' he said. But once he learned of the death-penalty charges, ``that has really cracked now.''

Gutierrez said she was unsure whether anyone had yet told Qahtani that the Pentagon had struck his name from the 9/11 capital conspiracy case.

But, she said, ''I have to tell him that the United States is still threatening to bring charges against him,'' based on a Pentagon statement last week that the dismissal of the charges was ``without prejudice.''

She was permitted to describe the suicide attempts only this week because her lawyer-client notes were initially classified secret at Guantánamo under Pentagon rules that grant attorneys access to war-on-terror detainees.

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