Three Arab men braided nooses from bedsheets and T-shirts to hang themselves in 2006 at the Guantánamo Bay prison camps, and left notes appearing to protest the military's forced feeding regime and treatment of the Koran, according to a Navy investigation partially made public on Friday.

The Navy Criminal Investigative Service issued a 934-word statement that shed little light on the episode after the close of business Friday.

It left unexplained one key question -- why guards had not checked on the men for 2 ½ hours before they were discovered hanging in their cells at Camp Delta at about 12:30 a.m. on June 10, 2006.

For years, tours of the prison camps have described a strict doctrine that had guards check on each detainee every few minutes.

According to the NCIS statement, five block guards were on duty that night but the men were last seen alive at 10 p.m. Them Arabs hung themselves in individual cells in the same block of the makeshift open air prison camp compound, and had placed blankets and sheets to obscure the guards' view.

The deaths were the-first at the Pentagon's showcase detention center. Then-commander Rear Adm. Harry Harris called the deaths an act of ''asymmetrical warfare,'' triggering international condemnation by human rights groups and lawyers who said they reflected despair.

''There was no evidence of wrongdoing by the guards,'' said Army Col. Gary Keck, a Defense Department spokesman, by e-mail on Friday night, ``and no disciplinary actions was taken by the command.''

The dead detainees were two Saudis and a Yemeni held as ''enemy combatants,'' including 21-year old Yassar Talal al Zahrani, described as a Taliban fighter who arrived at the prison camps in southeast Cuba as a teenager.

A senior Pentagon official who read the report and provided details in exchange for anonymity noted that the Navy investigation found the simultaneous suicides to be acts of ``defiance and martyrdom.''

The criminal investigative service had yet to release the report, even a censored version which was circulating at the Pentagon on Friday. But the official offered these excerpts from notes found in each man's pocket and elaborated on in more detailed suicide notes in their cell.

One detainee: ``I did not like the tube in my mouth, now go ahead now accept the rope in my neck.''

At Guantánamo, a detainee protesting his confinement by refusing to eat is force-fed by snaking a tube up his nose, down the back of his throat and into his stomach.

Second detainee: ``I turned in my Koran not insult. . . Now I'm turning in my body and sacred are so you not insult it.''

Third detainee: ``I left out of the cage despite of you.''

Unclear Friday was whether the report quoted awkward Arabic-English translations of the detainees' notes, or the men had written in crude English.

The NCIS statement, which declared the investigation closed, said a redacted version would be posted on a Department of Defense website ``in the near future.''

'The manner of death for all detainees was determined to be suicide and the cause of death was determined to be by hanging, the medical term being ``mechanical asphyxia,' '' said the NCIS statement.

It did not, however, say when in the past two years that investigators concluded the deaths were suicide.

It took the agency more than two years to close the investigation in part because investigators were considering whether a fellow prisoner ``was directing detainees to commit suicide.''

As part of the investigation, the statement said, guards seized 1,065 pounds of documents from various prisoners. They had to be read by an independent team of linguists and investigators created by the agency to avoid violating privileged communications between Camp Delta detainees and their U.S. attorneys.

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