U.S. Envoy Reportedly Told Germany of Abductee

Germany’s former interior minister was told by an American diplomat in 2004 that the CIA might have mistakenly abducted and detained a German citizen suspected of having ties to Al Qaeda, the German government announced Wednesday.

The minister, Otto Schily, was informed in May 2004 by then-U.S. Ambassador Daniel R. Coats that Khaled Masri, a car salesman of Lebanese descent, claimed he had been in U.S. custody for five months, the Interior Ministry statement said. In an interview with a German weekly to be published today, Schily said he was visited by Coats after Masri had been released. Schily told Die Zeit that he asked the U.S. for an explanation but that “unfortunately this did not happen in an adequate manner.”

In its statement, the Interior Ministry said “Schily assured Coats the information would remain strictly confidential.”

What Schily knew about the Masri case has been at the center of a political debate here about whether the former government under then-Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder was aware of secret U.S. detention centers in Europe and the use of CIA planes to transport suspected militants through German airspace.

Schroeder’s liberal-leaning government was often critical of Bush administration policies, and Schily denied knowledge of CIA activities regarding prisoners. But the new coalition government of Chancellor Angela Merkel is under pressure to find out why CIA-chartered planes made what the German government said this week were more than 430 overflights and stopovers in Germany, including landings at Ramstein Air Base.

The nation’s opposition parties have called for a debate in Parliament next week on the matter. Merkel has said that Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who had been Schroeder’s chief of staff for six years, will answer questions before a special government committee about his knowledge of alleged secret prisons and CIA flights.

“Admit only what you can’t deny, and do it only slice by slice,” Wolfgang Gehrcke, a leftist member of Parliament, said in suggesting his government had knowledge of CIA operations. “The war on terror is being fought with terror methods. The USA is establishing a worldwide gulag with the hooded man of Abu Ghraib as its terrible symbol. And all this was not known by the German federal government?”

Anger over the Bush administration’s covert intelligence practices and seizures of suspected militants has swept across Europe over the last month. Suspicions were further heightened this week when Masri filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in northern Virginia against former CIA Director George J. Tenet and others.

Masri claims he was kidnapped while traveling in Macedonia and later flown to a U.S.-run detention facility in Afghanistan. He was interrogated, tortured and held for a total of five months before being released without an explanation, according to his lawsuit. The U.S. government has said it will not comment on the ongoing case.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice stated at a news conference with Merkel on Tuesday: “Any policy will sometimes result in errors, and when it does we will do everything we can to rectify them.”

The Masri affair and the CIA flights have complicated Merkel’s plans to improve U.S.-German ties that were strained under Schroeder.