Newly released CIA documents detail wrongful rendition of German
As reported by Deutsche Welle (DW), Germany’s international broadcaster, Khalid al-Masri was living at the time in the southern German town of Neu-Ulm. He was arrested on the border between Serbia and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM) on December 31, 2003, only because – as was confirmed by the US Senate in 2014 – he shared a name with an al-Qaeda suspect.
Authorities in FYROM held him in a hotel in Skopje for three weeks before he was handed over to CIA agents, who then flew him to a secret prison in Kabul, Afghanistan, in late January 2004.
According to the CIA report, he spent four months there being interrogated, before he was eventually released in Albania in May 2004 and “clandestinely returned to Germany”.
“The al-Masri operation was characterised by a number of missteps from the beginning that were compounded by subsequent failures of legal and management oversight,” the report said. “CIA did not have al-Masri’s passport examined by Agency experts until early March 2004, when it was found to be genuine.”
Moreover, the report found that “after quickly concluding that he was not a terrorist,” agents decided to detain him on the grounds that “they knew that he was ‘bad’.”
Al-Masri himself has claimed since that he was shackled, beaten, injected with drugs, force-fed and sodomized – a claim that the European Court of Human Rights agreed with in a ruling in 2012.
His case was also taken up by the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR), which filed a lawsuit in Germany to try and have the 13 CIA agents involved in al-Masri’s rendition and detention deported – which the German government turned down. Nevertheless, in 2007, a Munich court did issue arrest warrants for the unknown US agents involved, on charges of kidnapping. A case was also pursued in Spain, reported DW.
The European Court of Human Rights verdict in 2012 also ruled that FYROM had been “responsible for his torture and ill-treatment”, and ordered the FYROM government to pay €60,000 in damages.
According to DW, Germany’s response has been rather cagey. In December 2014, the ECCHR wrote a letter to Justice Minister Heiko Maas to work toward getting compensation for al-Masri. There has been no response as yet (the ministry did not respond to a DW request for comment).
According to Amnesty International, no victim of the CIA’s rendition and torture programme has received compensation.
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