JURIST - Paper Chase: No evidence to disprove el-Masri rendition allegations: German prosecutor

[JURIST] No evidence has surfaced to disprove the extraordinary rendition allegations [statement] of the German man who sued the US Central Intelligence Agency, a German prosecutor familiar with the evidence collected by the German government in the case said Thursday. Khalid El-Masri [JURIST news archive; ACLU case materials] has said he was kidnapped in Macedonia in 2003 in an instance of extraordinary rendition [JURIST news archive], held by the CIA in Afghanistan where he was subjected to inhumane conditions and coercive interrogation, and finally released in 2004 and dropped off in Albania without ever being charged. The prosecutor also said that while el-Masri's statement that he was interrogated by a German-speaking captor while on the plane to Afghanistan seems to be credible, the speaker was not necessarily a German agent or official.

The prosecutor was testifying before a parliamentary panel that was established in April [JURIST report] to investigate several allegations of official misconduct. Along with allegations that reports from German intelligence service BND may have contributed to el-Masri's seizure [JURIST report], the panel is investigating BND's role in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, when the country was officially against the war, and reports that German officials interrogated detainees [JURIST report] in Afghanistan. Bloomberg has more.

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