INTERVIEW-U.S. won't react yet to German CIA warrants
09 Feb 2007 16:39:54 GMT Source: Reuters
By Louis Charbonneau MUNICH, Germany, Feb 9 (Reuters) - U.S. authorities have told German prosecutors they will not respond yet to arrest warrants for 13 suspected CIA agents accused of kidnapping a German national, a senior prosecutor said on Friday. "We were told that they (the Americans) would not be processing the request for the moment due to a civil complaint filed against the responsible people at the CIA," chief prosecutor in the Bavarian state capital Munich, August Stern, told Reuters in an interview. Last month a Munich court ordered the arrest of 13 people on suspicion of kidnapping Khaled el-Masri, a German of Lebanese descent who says he was flown from Macedonia to Afghanistan where he says he was imprisoned for months and tortured. Masri has filed a lawsuit in the United States demanding an apology and damages from former CIA director George Tenet and several CIA employees. The case was dismissed by a lower U.S. court and was then put before a U.S. court of appeals. German prosecutors say the 13 should be charged with falsely imprisoning and causing grievous bodily harm to Masri between the time of his abduction in late 2003 and his release in May 2004. Stern said it would not be easy to track down the 13 since the names they used were fake. However, he said they were working with authorities in other European countries to try to positively identify the people who carried out Masri's "rendition" -- the transfer of suspected terrorists to third countries for interrogation. "We believe that there were two groups in the rendition team," he said. "One was the flight crew and the other were persons who were detaining Masri in the airplane." The Munich prosecutors have not named the nationalities of the suspects, although according to German media reports, most of them are residents of the United States. If investigators positively identify the agents, they run the risk of being detained when they leave the United States. It was unclear when and if the United States would react to the arrest warrants, he said. "We just have to wait," he said. Despite widespread speculation in German media that German government officials or authorities may have known about Masri's kidnapping, Stern said there was no evidence to support this. "We have no indication that any government authorities knew about the kidnapping before it happened or while it was under way," he said. Masri's case has focused media scrutiny in Europe on renditions, a topic that has caused tensions both within Germany and between Berlin and Washington.
