|
CIA said to have wrongly held German suspect
By Reuters
WASHINGTON (Reuters)
- CIA operatives held a German citizen in a prison in Afghanistan for six weeks even after determining he was not an Osama bin Laden associate and despite an order from then-U.S. national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, NBC News reported on Thursday.
Authorities in Germany have been investigating complaints by Khaled el-Masri, a Lebanese-born German who says he was abducted in Macedonia on New Year's Eve in 2003 and flown to Afghanistan.
Masri said he was beaten and injected with drugs by interrogators, who suspected he had ties to bin Laden's al Qaeda network. He was released in May 2004 in Albania.
NBC said he had been picked up because his name matched someone trained in bin Laden's camps and his German passport was thought to be fake.
The network, citing unnamed senior U.S. officials, said CIA officers concluded Masri was the wrong man after his passport proved legitimate. The network said then-CIA Director George Tenet had been alerted to the error.
But Masri was held at a CIA-run prison dubbed the Salt Pit for another six weeks "while officials debated how to handle the mistake," NBC said.
It said the matter reached Rice, now secretary of state and then President George W. Bush's chief national security adviser. She ordered Masri's immediate release, twice, before he was finally let go, the report said.
A CIA representative had no comment. The CIA's inspector general is investigating, NBC quoted intelligence sources as saying.
In January, Munich prosecutor Martin Hofmann told Reuters state prosecutors were investigating unnamed parties on suspicion of abduction of Masri, then 41.
German officials had verified the details of Masri's journey up to the Macedonian border, where he was taken off a tourist bus, Hofmann said. He said they were working with overseas counterparts to establish what happened next.
Reuters
(In accordance with Title 17
U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to
those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the
included information for research and educational purposes.
Information Clearing House has no affiliation whatsoever with the
originator of this article nor is Information Clearing House
endorsed or sponsored by the originator.) |
