Warrants for 13 in CIA ‘kidnap’ case

Arrest warrants have been issued for 13 people in connection with the alleged CIA-orchestrated kidnapping of a German citizen, a Munich prosecutor said

Arrest warrants have been issued for 13 people in connection with the alleged CIA-orchestrated kidnapping of a German citizen, a Munich prosecutor said on Wednesday.

Prosecutor Christian Schmidt-Sommerfeld said the warrants were issued in the last few days in conjunction with the case of Khaled al-Masri. A German citizen of Lebanese descent, al-Masri says he was abducted in December 2003 at the Serbian-Macedonian border and flown by the CIA to a detention centre in Kabul, Afghanistan, where he was abused. Al-Masri says he was released in Albania in May 2004 after the CIA discovered they had the wrong person.

Munich prosecutors have previously said that they had received the names of several US secret agents believed to be involved in the 2003 kidnapping from Spanish investigators. But it was not immediately clear whether they were the people sought in the warrants.

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The al-Masri case has been a sore point in otherwise good German-US relations.

In a separate case, Italian authorities are seeking the arrest of 26 Americans, all but one believed to be CIA agents, in connection with the 2003 kidnapping in Milan of Egyptian cleric and terror suspect Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr.

The US Justice Department has declined to provide Munich prosecutors assistance, citing ongoing legal proceedings in the United States.

Al-Masri has asked a federal appeals court in Richmond, Virginia, to reinstate a lawsuit he filed against the CIA. A judge dismissed the lawsuit in May, ruling that a trial could harm national security by revealing details about CIA activities.

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