SSH apparently not reading keys inside ~/.ssh

debug1: identity file /home/manuth/.ssh/dqar-rsa type 1

Says it read the file successfully. The failure is somewhere else.

ssh_exchange_identification: Connection closed by remote host

This is the real problem. You can't establish SSH connection to the remote host for some reason. You are probably blacklisted using /etc/hosts.deny or the server is failing to accept the connections and initiate SSH protocol for other reasons (missing directories, disk failures, full disk, etc.). The logs from the server will tell you more.

Nov 7 13:51:32 dqar sshd [11316]: fatal: Missing privilege separation directory: /var/empty

Explains it pretty much. You need to create this directory if it was removed for some reasons and set proper permissions (not writable by any other users than root).

So the reason was that, somehow, there was no /var/empty. I created it back from this forum post (I know it's for Juniper, but it's working on this FreeBSD as well): http://forums.juniper.net/t5/Ethernet-Switching/Missing-privilege-separation-directory-var-empty/td-p/173832