BERLIN, Dec 9: Information Germany shared with the United States may have prompted the CIA to abduct a German citizen and fly him to Afghanistan for interrogation as a suspected terrorist, a newspaper reported on Friday.
The report, if true, would be a huge embarrassment for German authorities.
It added to pressure on the government to reveal what its own officials may have known about the case of Khaled el Masri, a German citizen who is suing the CIA for wrongful imprisonment after being held in an Afghan prison for five months last year.
“It is possible that information we exchanged with the
US authorities alerted the
CIA to Masri,” an unnamed German security official told the daily Berliner Zeitung newspaper.
“It’s striking that in their interrogation of Masri in Afghanistan the Americans were asking about information they received from us,” the official was quoted as saying.
He said German authorities passed on information about Mr Masri because he knew Reda Seyam, a German-based radical who was of interest to the Americans and is under investigation in Germany as an alleged supporter of a terrorist organization.
Spokesmen for the government and for German security agencies declined to comment on whether they had exchanged information on Mr Masri with the Americans, but a senior government lawmaker said the report was plausible.
“I hope it’s not true, but I’m afraid it could be true,” Wolfgang Bosbach told the Mitteldeutsche Zeitung newspaper. “That would be a nightmare.”
WHO WAS ‘SAM’”? Mr Masri, who was initially detained in Macedonia and then flown to Afghanistan, has also testified that towards the end of his captivity he was questioned in prison by a native German speaker, whom he knew only as ‘Sam’.
Government press officials declined to comment when asked about this incident, which has also fed speculation that German security officials knew of Mr Masri’s plight.
His case caused diplomatic embarrassment this week when Chancellor Angela Merkel said Washington had acknowledged it as a mistake, but US officials denied making any such admission.
The case has come to symbolize European concerns about methods used by the United States and its Central Intelligence Agency in waging the ‘ar on terrorism’.
Reports that the CIA has run secret prisons in eastern Europe and covertly flown terrorism suspects across the continent overshadowed a visit to Europe this week by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, despite her assurances that the United States acts within the law and shuns torture.
A Munich prosecutor in charge of investigating Mr Masri’s disappearance said his office was considering asking the German government for more information on what it knew on his case.
Prosecutor August Stern said it would ‘certainly be interesting’ to get more detail on a May 2004 meeting at which the US ambassador told then Interior Minister Otto Schily that Mr Masri had been held in Afghanistan but was being freed.
A US official said this week that Masri was released after the United States realised it ‘no longer had evidence or intelligence to justify his continued detention’. —Reuters