February 01, 2007	Thursday	Muharram 12, 1428

BERLIN, Jan 31: German authorities have issued arrest warrants for 13 suspected CIA agents in connection with the alleged kidnapping of a German citizen, a Munich prosecutor said on Wednesday .

The warrants were issued in the last few days on suspicion of false imprisonment and causing seriously bodily harm, prosecutor Christian Schmidt-Sommerfeld told journalists.

Khaled al-Masri, a German citizen of Lebanese descent, maintains he was abducted in Dec 2003 at the Serbian-Macedonian border and flown by the CIA to a detention centre in Kabul, where he says he was abused.

Al-Masri says he was released in Albania in May 2004 after the CIA discovered they had the wrong person.

None of the suspects were identified. However, Schmidt-Sommerfeld said in a later statement that `the personal details contained in the arrest warrants are, according to our current knowledge, aliases of CIA agents’.

“Further investigation will, among other things, concentrate on trying to determine the clear identities of the suspects,” he added. Germany's NDR television released a list of the names -- 11 men and two women -- it said its reporters had obtained. It said three had been contacted by its reporters, but they had refused comment.

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and other US officials have declined to address the case. However, German Chancellor Angela Merkel has said Washington has acknowledged making a mistake with al-Masri.

Schmidt-Sommerfeld said prosecutors were led to the suspects after receiving a list in Dec 2005 of possible people involved in the kidnapping compiled by a Spanish journalist from sources within the country's Civil Guard, a paramilitary police unit that answers to the interior ministry.—AP