Guantanamo inmate set for Germany return: magazine

BERLIN (Reuters) – A Turkish man held since 2002 in the
U.S. prison camp at Guantanamo Bay can expect to be released in
the coming months and returned to his home in Germany, the
German magazine Focus said on Saturday.

The German embassy in Washington was working to provide the
security guarantees that the United States was demanding, such
as continued surveillance, as a condition for the release of
Murat Kurnaz, Focus said.

The magazine said Kurnaz could be freed by mid-year.

A government spokesman confirmed the German embassy was in
talks with U.S. officials in a bid to end Kurnaz’s detention.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who criticized the
Guantanamo base before a trip to Washington last month, had
discussed Kurnaz’s case with U.S. President George W. Bush last
month, the spokesman added.

Kurnaz, who was born in Germany in 1982 to Turkish parents
and is a Turkish national, 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, Cuba, where the
United States is holding hundreds of men it suspects of backing
Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda or Afghanistan’s radical Islamist
Taliban.

Kurnaz’s German lawyer has said Kurnaz may have wanted to
join the Taliban but was at most a “wannabe” militant, who had
not taken part in armed conflict.

Kurnaz says he has suffered abuse at Guantanamo, where the
United States has come under strong criticism from human rights
groups for holding some 500 foreign terrorism suspects, many
for as long as four years.

Those held in Guantanamo have been designated “enemy 3
combatants,” a label which allows Washington to argue that they
are not entitled to the rights accorded to prisoners of war
under the terms of the Geneva Convention.