The German government has not yet responded in kind to the apology offered by Macedonia to a German citizen abused by the CIA in 2003. The wrongfully imprisoned Khalid al-Masri says he was tortured while in custody.
The German government is yet to respond to Macedonia's apology to Khalid al-Masri, the German-Lebanese man who was wrongfully seized and then abused as part of the US Central Intelligence Agency's rendition program 14 years ago.
Al-Masri, a German citizen living at the time in the southern town of Neu-Ulm, was arrested on the border between Serbia and Macedonia on December 31, 2003, because — as the US Senate found in 2014 — he shared a name with an al-Qaida suspect.
The human rights group Open Society Foundations reported this week that Macedonian Foreign Minister Nikola Dimitrov wrote to al-Masri to express "sincere apologies and unreserved regrets" for his country's "improper conduct." Macedonia's government later confirmed the apology to the Associated Press.
But the German government has yet to comment on the case, even though the then-German chief-of-staff (and now President) Frank-Walter Steinmeier came under criticism for apparently suppressing information on the case.
In 2005, Steinmeier (by that time foreign minister) dismissed accusations that the government had reacted too slowly, and denied suggestions that the German security authorities had colluded with the CIA or passed on any information about al-Masri. But in 2006 he was forced to deny new claims that he had known much earlier about al-Masri's abduction, which led to more accusations that he had suppressed information before the German parliament's inquiry into secret service activity.
It is known that the German government gave the US overfly permission for its rendition program, and that Germany's CIA equivalent, the BND, cooperated closely with US intelligence following the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The German government did not want to comment to DW on Friday, other than to say that the issue had been dealt with in parliamentary hearings at the time.
