'They beat me from all
sides'
The Guardian
Friday January 14, 2005
A German car salesman says that a year ago he was kidnapped in
Europe, beaten and flown to a US-controlled jail in Afghanistan.
Now the German government is collecting evidence to back up his
story. James Meek hears Khaled el-Masri's account of life in
America's secret offshore prison network
A man is walking alone along a mountain path in the darkness.
He is carrying a suitcase. He seems frightened, tired and
confused. He has long hair and a long beard, but they are untidy,
as if he did not grow them voluntarily. He turns a bend and meets
three men carrying Kalashnikovs.
The man shows them his passport. It indicates that he is a
German citizen, born in Lebanon, called Khaled el-Masri. Using
poor English, he tells them that he does not know where he is.
They tell him that he is on the Albanian border, close to Serbia
and Macedonia, and that he is there illegally since he doesn't
have an Albanian stamp in his passport.
The story that el-Masri tells them by way of explanation, on
this evening in late May 2004, is extraordinary: a story of how
an unemployed German car salesman from the town of Ulm went on a
New Year's holiday to Macedonia, was seized by Macedonian police
at the border, held incommunicado for weeks without charge, then
beaten, stripped, shackled and blindfolded and flown to a jail in
Afghanistan, run by Afghans but controlled by Americans. Five
months after first being seized, he says, still with no
explanation or charge, he was flown back to Europe and dumped in
an unknown country which turned out to be Albania.
What really happened? With no way to prove his story,
el-Masri's account remains in the balance, a terrifying snapshot
of America's "war on terror". It is certain that he returned home
to Ulm from Albania in May 2004, and that he was taken off a bus
from Germany at the Macedonian border on New Year's Eve 2003. The
only person who has offered a clear explanation for what happened
in the five months in between is el-Masri himself. Yet that may
change.
The German authorities are now taking his allegations very
seriously. They are subjecting a sample from el-Masri's hair to
radioisotope analysis, which can reveal, down to a particular
country, the source of a person's food and drink over a period of
time. Discussions are also under way about bringing to Germany
two men whom el-Masri has identified as being with him in the
Afghan prison, and who were also subsequently released. The fact
that the German authorities do regard Ulm as an area of
potentially dangerous radical Islamic activity - a number of
premises were raided and alleged Islamic activists were arrested
on Wednesday - only emphasises the concern that Germany has over
the el-Masri case.
So far the US authorities have neither confirmed nor denied
el-Masri's story, although German investigators first requested
information about the case in autumn. The FBI office in the US
embassy in Berlin did not return calls yesterday.
On Tuesday the Guardian was the first European news
organisation to interview el-Masri, at the Ulm offices of his
lawyer, Manfred Gnjidic. In a conversation lasting more than four
hours, el-Masri conveyed a powerful impression of sincerity: if
his story is not true, he must be an actor of genius. He broke
down in sobs as he described the moment he was abducted by masked
men and put on a plane, excused himself to vomit as he recalled
the filthy water he was given to drink in jail, and brightened as
he described the hours before his return to Germany. Often he
would pick up a pen and sketch the layout of a room or
building.
If true, the abduction would add to our understanding of a
pattern of US behaviour frightening in its implications both for
America and for the rest of the world. The former director of the
CIA, George Tenet, told the US 9/11 Commission last year that
even before September 11 the US had abducted more than 70
foreigners it considered terrorists - a process Washington has
declared legal under the label "extraordinary rendition".
An investigation by the Washington Post last year suggested
that the US held 9,000 people overseas in an archipelago of known
prisons (such as Abu Ghraib in Iraq) and unknown ones run by the
Pentagon, the CIA or other organisations. But this figure does
not include others "rendered" to third-party governments who then
act as subcontractors for Washington, enabling the US to
effectively torture detainees while technically denying that it
carries out torture.
El-Masri's ordeal began, he says, when he decided to escape,
for one week over New Year, the stress of living in a single room
in Ulm as the unemployed father of a family of six. On a friend's
recommendation he bought a cheap bus ticket to Skopje, capital of
Macedonia, intending to find a hotel when he got there.
The bus left the borders of the EU and crossed Serbia without
incident. Then, at the Macedonian border, at 3pm, el-Masri was
called off the bus. Now 41, he has lived in Germany for 20 years,
the last 10 as a citizen. "I didn't feel bad," he says. "I just
thought it was a mistake."
He was taken to a room with a table and chairs where four men
whom he took to be Slavic searched his luggage and questioned him
in poor English, asking him about links to Islamic organisations.
Several hours later, flanked by armed police, he was driven to a
city he assumes was Skopje and escorted to the hotel room where
he was to spend the next few weeks. "I asked if I was arrested,"
says el-Masri. "They said: 'Can you see handcuffs?'"
El-Masri was kept prisoner in the room for 23 days; Macedonian
civilian police were constantly present, and he was subject to
repeated interrogations about his links to Islamic organisations
- he says he has none - and about the mosque in Ulm where he
worships.
After about 10 days, a Macedonian Mr Nice appeared. "He said
it was taking a long time, too much time - let's make an end to
it, and let's make a deal. 'We have to say you are a member of
al-Qaida ... then we'll put you on a plane and take you back to
Germany.' I refused, naturally. It would have been suicide to
sign."
But el-Masri was accused of having been to a terror training
camp in Jalalabad, of having a fake passport, and being in
reality a citizen of Egypt. On the evening of January 23, he was
handcuffed, blindfolded, put in a car and told he was going to
Germany. He was driven to a place where he heard the sound of a
plane, then heard the voice of one of the Macedonians saying he
would have a medical examination.
"I heard the door being closed," says el-Masri. "And then they
beat me from all sides, from everywhere, with hands and feet.
With knives or scissors they took away my clothes. In silence.
The beating, I think, was just to humiliate me, to hurt me, to
make me afraid, to make me silent. They stripped me naked. I was
terrified. They tried to take off my pants. I tried to stop them
so they beat me again. And when I was naked I heard a camera."
El-Masri breaks down as he recalls the moment when the men
carried out an intrusive anal search.
He was dressed in a nappy, a short-sleeved, short-legged suit
and a belt. His feet were shackled and his hands were chained to
the belt. His ears were plugged and ear defenders placed over
them and a clip put on his nose. A hood was put over his
blindfold. With his arms raised painfully high behind his back,
he was driven to an aircraft where he was thrown down on to a
bare metal floor, chained and bound, and given an injection. He
was dimly aware of a landing and takeoff and a second injection
before the plane landed again and he was put into the boot of a
car.
El-Masri arrived in what he later found to be his cell by
being pushed violently against the wall, thrown to the floor,
having feet placed on his head and his back and having his chains
removed. The cell was to be his home for the next four months.
From the graffiti on the wall - in Arabic script, but not Arabic
- and the Afghan dress of the guards, he deduced that he was in
Afghanistan. There was nothing in the cell except a blanket, a
filthy plastic mat and a bottle of tainted water so vile that the
memory of it makes him literally gag.
El-Masri soon discovered that the prison, though technically
Afghan, was run from behind the scenes by the US. His first
encounter with an American was with a masked individual who spoke
English with what el-Masri believes was an American accent. He
had a Palestinian translator. The American took a blood sample
and photographed el-Masri naked again.
"I asked him if I could have fresh water," said el-Masri. "And
he said: 'It's not our problem, it's a problem of the Afghan
people.' I said: 'Afghanistan doesn't have planes to kidnap
people in Europe and bring them here, so it's not the problem of
the Afghan people.'"
By whispering through the door, and exchanging messages on
pieces of toilet paper, el-Masri found out a few details about
his fellow prisoners: two Saudi brothers of Pakistani origin who
had been imprisoned for two years, two Tanzanians, a Pakistani, a
Yemeni, and several Afghans. (Mr Gnjidic says two of the
prisoners have been traced but he didn't want to identify them
for fear of putting their lives at risk.)
El-Masri says the first of many interrogations was carried out
by a masked man with a south Lebanese accent, with seven or eight
silent observers in black masks listening in. "He said: 'Do you
know where you are?' And I answered: 'Yes, I know, I'm in Kabul.'
So he said: 'It's a country without laws. And nobody knows that
you are here. Do you know what this means?'"
Repeatedly, he would be asked the same questions, challenging
his identity, accusing him of attending terrorist training camps.
Some of the interrogators, el-Masri believes, were American.
After about a month, el-Masri met two unmasked Americans who
other prisoners referred to as "the Doctor" and "the Boss". The
Doctor was a tall, pale man in his 60s with grey collar-length
hair. The Boss was younger, with red hair and blue eyes, about
5ft 10in, and wore glasses. Then, in March, el-Masri and the
other prisoners began a hunger strike. After 27 days of
starvation, he was taken in chains one night to meet the
Americans and a senior Afghan. Near to hysteria, el-Masri said
they had to let him go, put him before a US court, let him speak
to somebody from the German government, or watch him starve to
death.
The Boss told him he had to get Washington's permission to
help him, but was clearly angry, saying: "He shouldn't be here.
He's in the wrong place." "I had the impression that the Doctor
thought I wasn't guilty, and had sent a report saying so even
after the second interrogation," says el-Masri. Yet he was taken
back to his cell, where he continued his hunger strike.
Conditions in the cell improved, with a bed and a new carpet, but
he was barely able to move. On the 37th day he was force fed
chocolate-flavoured nutrients through a tube stuffed up his nose.
El-Masri began to eat again and the Americans brought him fresh
water and promised that he would be released within three
weeks.
They brought a native German speaker to the prison. "I asked
him: 'Are you from the German authorities?' He said: 'I do not
want to answer that question.' When I asked him if the German
authorities knew that I was there, he answered: 'I can't answer
this question.'" (Hofmann, the prosecutor, says the German
security services do not admit to any knowledge of an agent
visiting el-Masri in prison.)
It was to be more than a week before el-Masri finally got out
of the prison; the German told him one of the obstacles to his
speedy release was the Americans' determination not to leave any
evidence that he had ever been there. He was flown to Albania in
what he thinks was a small passenger jet, blindfolded and in
plastic handcuffs.
When el-Masri got back to Ulm, he found his wife and four
children had disappeared. They had returned to Lebanon. He traced
them, brought them back, and told his wife his story.
"It was a crime, it was humiliating, and it was inhuman,
although I think that in Afghanistan I was treated better than
the other prisoners. Somebody in the prison told me that before I
came somebody died under torture. Those responsible have to take
responsibility, and should be held to account."
Hofmann and his investigative team now have two tasks: to find
evidence supporting or disproving el-Masri's story and, if they
can show it is true, to work out who to charge with kidnapping.
But how do you charge a government? "For the moment," says
Hofmann, "I have to believe the story, because there is no
evidence that it is not true."
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