A long-held Yemeni captive and frequent hunger striker committed suicide in a cell at the prison camps at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, the military said Tuesday.

Guards tried unsuccessfully to revive Muhammad Ahmad Abdallah Salih, 31, known as Prisoner Number 78, after he was found unconscious on Monday night, said Navy Lt. Cmdr. Brook DeWalt, a prison camps spokesman.

Salih was the fifth captive to apparently commit suicide in the sprawling American prison camps compound since the Bush administration opened the prison camps in January 2002. He was the first during the tenure of President Barack Obama, who has ordered the detention center emptied by Jan. 22.

The Yemeni had been held on occasion in the detention center psychiatric ward, although detention center officials would say neither whether he was found dead in a cell there nor how he had died.

Guantánamo health records show Salih as a 5-foot-7-inch man who was weighed in to Camp X-Ray at 124 pounds on Feb. 8, 2002 -- days after his 24th birthday. His Guantánamo weight chart show that while fasting around Christmas 2005 he had withered to 85 pounds.

Salih has never been publicly identified as a candidate for trial.

U.S. military officials said he was captured at Mazar e Sharif during the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001. His detainee documents say he went to Afghanistan before the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks ''to participate in jihad'' with members of the Taliban.

Human rights groups blamed the U.S. indefinite detention regime that has evolved in the war on terror.

''Tragic deaths like this one have become all too common in a system that locks up detainees indefinitely without charge or trial,'' said Ben Wizner, staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union.

He urged an ``immediate, independent and transparent investigation into the circumstances surrounding this apparent suicide and the conditions of confinement at Guantánamo.''

DeWalt said Salih was a chronic hunger striker and had been at times fed by military medical personnel who strap the captive into a chair and tether a tube up his nose to pump a liquid nutritional shake into his stomach.

He had resumed eating on his own in mid-May, Dewalt said.

Yemen's Embassy in Washington said the episode underscored the urgent need to close the prison camps where more than one in three of the 240 detainees are from Osama bin Laden's ancestral homeland.

While other nations have succeeded in repatriating many of their captives from U.S. detention, Sana'a and Washington have long been stymied over what kind of rehabilitation or tracking program Yemen might implement.

''The Yemeni government is looking forward to cooperate closely with the U.S. administration to expedite President's Obama decision to close Guantánamo,'' said Yemeni spokesman Mohammed Albasha.

A Yemeni diplomat was en route to the remote outpost in southeast Cuba to make sure the Yemeni's remains were being handled with Muslim rites -- and to arrange for the captive's remains to be repatriated.

A military autopsy was scheduled for Wednesday.

Washington D.C. attorney David Remes, who defends more than a dozen Yemenis at Guantánamo, said Salih had never met with a lawyer but that civil liberties attorneys had filed a habeas corpus petition on his behalf at the U.S. District Court in Washington D.C.

The court docket shows that Judge Ellen S. Huvelle had set an Aug. 12 hearing date on Salih's case.

Salih's Guantanamo documents indicate he had never gone before any of the military review boards that since 2004 have considered his status as an enemy combatant. Military officials have long said attendance is voluntary.

Four detainees who killed themselves in 2006 and 2007 were found hanging. Three were Saudis. One was Yemeni.

None of those men had ever met with an attorney either.

This week's apparent suicide occurred while about a dozen journalists were visiting the Navy base in southeast Cuba for a brief session of the mostly closed war court, or military commissions. Reporters have been in and out of the camps for about a week, but none had been known to visit the mental health ward in a series of media tours of the detention center.

The New York Center for Constitutional Rights, which has championed some detainees' unlawful detention suits, said after word of the death that ``frustrations and disappointment at [Guantánamo's detention center] are running high because the hopes for change under the new administration were so great. Only two people have gone home in the last five months, and, by all counts, conditions at the prison have not improved.''

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