BERLIN, Oct 4 (Reuters) - A Turk with German residency who spent years in the Guantanamo Bay prison camp said in a magazine interview that German soldiers abused him in Afghanistan shortly after Pakistan handed him to U.S. authorities in 2001. "I hadn't even been there for two weeks when I was brought between two trucks. Apparently two German soldiers wanted to see me," Murat Kurnaz was quoted as saying in an interview to appear in Thursday's edition of weekly Stern magazine. "They wore camouflage uniforms, with a design that was made of small dots, like it was computer-generated, and they wore the German flag on their sleeves," he said. Kurnaz, in his first interview since he was released in August, was quoted as saying that he was forced to lie down with his hands tied behind his back. "One of them pulled me up by my hair. 'Do you know who we are?' He wanted to brag. 'We're the German forces.' He hit my head on the ground and the Americans found this funny." If confirmed, Kurnaz's allegations could embarrass Germany, which is already defending itself against allegations that the previous government secretly aided a U.S. "rendition" programme to kidnap and fly terrorism suspects to third countries for interrogation. German citizen Khaled el-Masri, whose story of "rendition" has already been a source of embarrassment to the German government, said he was interrogated by a German while held in Afghanistan. A German government spokesman said that the charges were not new. A spokesman for the defence ministry said it had no clues indicating German soldiers had interrogated Kurnaz. Germany has some 2,900 troops in Afghanistan as part of a NATO peace-keeping mission. Kurnaz was freed after more than four years in captivity and returned to Germany in chains on a U.S. military aircraft. Dubbed the "Bremer Taliban", Kurnaz, born in Germany in 1982, was in the process of becoming a German citizen when he was arrested in Pakistan in late 2001. He was taken from there to Guantanamo in Cuba, where the United States is holding hundreds of people it suspects are linked to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda or Afghanistan's radical Islamist Taliban. Kurnaz has said he has suffered abuse at Guantanamo and interrogation techniques including sexual humiliation, water torture and the desecration of Islam. The United States has come under criticism from human rights and some of its allies for holding some 450 foreign suspects at the naval base in Cuba without charge.
