Washington ? More than seven years ago, a suspected Afghan militant was brought to a dimly lit CIA compound northeast of the airport in Kabul, Afghanistan. The CIA called it the Salt Pit. Inmates knew it as the dark prison.

Inside a chilly cell, the man was shackled and left half-naked. He was found dead, exposed to the cold, in the early hours of Nov. 20, 2002.

The Salt Pit death was the only fatality known to have occurred inside the secret prison network the CIA operated abroad after the Sept. 11 attacks. The death had strong repercussions inside the CIA. It helped lead to a review that uncovered abuses in detention and interrogation procedures, and forced the agency to change those procedures.

The CIA’s program of waterboarding and other harsh treatment of suspected terrorists has been debated since it ended in 2006. The Salt Pit case stands as a cautionary tale about the unfettered use of such practices. The Obama administration shut the CIA’s prisons last year.

Little has emerged about the Afghan’s death, which the Justice Department is investigating. The Associated Press has learned the dead man’s name, as well as new details about his capture in Pakistan and his Afghan imprisonment.

The man was Gul Rahman, a suspected militant captured on Oct. 29, 2002, a U.S. official familiar with the case confirmed. The official said Rahman was taken during an operation against Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin, an insurgent group headed by Afghan warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and allied with al-Qaida.

A reference to Rahman’s death also turned up in a recently declassified government document.

The exact circumstances of Rahman’s death are not clear, but the Afghan was left in the cold cell on the morning of Nov. 20. He was naked from the waist down, said two former U.S. officials. Within hours, he was dead.

A CIA medic at the site concluded the Afghan died of hypothermia. A doctor sent later confirmed that judgment.

The case appeared to prod the CIA to codify its interrogations. The same month that the detainee died, the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center started training courses for interrogators, according to public documents.

The following year, the CIA issued guidelines covering the use of cold in interrogations, with detailed instructions for the “safe temperature range when a detainee is wet or unclothed.”

But harsh interrogation techniques continued until 2006.

When the inspector general’s report on the Salt Pit death emerged, it focused on decisions made by two CIA officials: an inexperienced officer who had just taken his first overseas assignment to run the prison, and the Kabul station chief, who managed CIA activities in Afghanistan. Their identities remain classified.