Alleged German Abuse

Murat Kurnaz, the 24-year-old, German-born Turk, has revealed that during his five years of imprisonment he was allegedly beaten by members of Germany's elite forces in Afghanistan as well as by US forces when he was moved to Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.

In an interview given to Germany's Stern magazine, Kurnaz described in detail how he was snatched as a terror suspect while traveling in Pakistan in 2001 and moved to a secret US-run prison in Kandahar, Afghanistan. There, he said, he was tortured by German soldiers in the presence of the prison's US guards.

"I hadn't even been there for two weeks before I was taken one evening behind two trucks," Kurnaz said in the interview. "One of the guards told me that two German soldiers wanted to see me. They were wearing camouflage uniforms, the kind of camouflage made with computer pixels, and they had German flags on their sleeves.

"We are the German power"

"I had to lie down with my hands tied behind my back. One of the Germans pulled me up by my hair and said, 'Do you know who we are?' He wanted to brag. 'We are the German power.' He then hit my head against the ground, which the Americans found amusing."

Hans-Herman Klare, the chief foreign editor at Stern magazine, said Kunaz' detailed description of the German soldiers gives credibility to his story.

"The kind of description he gives to us sounds very credible...we know for example that German Special Forces were in Kandahar at the time of his detention there. He describes the uniform and the particulars of the uniforms."

The elite KSK troops were the only German soldiers stationed in Afghanistan at the time of Kunaz' alleged abuse in Kandahar, presumably sometime between December and January 2002. The special forces operate in such secrecy that even the German parliament and its committees are often not aware of their missions or are only informed after the fact.

Defense ministry launching in-depth investigation

German Defense Minister Franz-Josef Jung said there was no current evidence to support Kurnaz' claims about the interrogation or the alleged abuse but added that he was taking the allegations very seriously.

A spokesman for the defense ministry, Thomas Raabe, added that the ministry would be launching a thorough investigation.

"According to our initial inquiries, there is no indication that German soldiers ever took part in the interrogation of a German-speaking prisoner being held by the US military. We know nothing about any prisoner abuse," Raabe said in a statement. "The Defense Ministry takes these accusations very seriously. A thorough investigation will be conducted that will clarify these accusations completely."

As a first step, the German defense ministry said it would question all the soldiers that had been deployed to Kandahar at the time of Kunaz' detention there.

Kunaz moved to a "place without laws"

After two months in detention in Kandahar, Kurnaz was transferred to the US prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. He has described Guantanamo as a "place without laws" where prisoners were beaten, humiliated and routinely banished to solitary confinement.

During his time there, Kurnaz suffered repeated abuse and interrogation techniques including sexual humiliation, water torture and sleep deprivation, he said.

Both the United States and Germany eventually concluded that Kurnaz was innocent.

Kurnaz' lawyer, Bernhard Docke, said Germany could have pressed for his client's release as early as 2002. But instead, Kurnaz remained imprisoned at Guantanamo for four additional years.

An investigative committee of the European Parliament has already been looking into Kurnaz' case, and Germany has in the meantime launched its own parliamentary inquiry.