And the New York Times has revealed new information on the first Guantanamo Bay prisoner believed to have died of natural causes. Abdul Razzaq Hekmati died in December following a bout with cancer. US forces arrested him in Afghanistan, where he was well known as a resistance fighter against the Soviet occupation of the 1980s. He was accused of being a Taliban commander and held for nearly five years at Guantanamo until his death. During his interrogation, Hekmati made several mentions of high-ranking Afghan officials who could have vouched for his innocence. These include Afghanistan’s minister of energy and a high-ranking general who Hekmati freed in a daring jail break from the Taliban’s top prison in 1999. But US officials made little to no effort to contact them. The two men now say they made personal appeals to Afghan President Hamid Karzai and US ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, with no result.