• English Site
• > SPIEGEL Blog

Kurnaz Takes on the Pentagon

Lawyer for Ex-Guantanamo Prisoner Sues US for Release of Vital Documents

Murat Kurnaz spent over four years in Guantánamo Bay after the US military decided he was an enemy combattant. Now his lawyer is suing the Pentagon for the release of documents that could exonerate his client.

DDP

Murat Kurnaz was released from Guantanamo in 2006. Now he is looking for complete exoneration.

According to a report in the Wednesday edition of the German newspaper Der Tagesspiegel, Baher Azmy, Kurnaz's US lawyer, is hoping to secure the release of documents that would exonerate the German-born Turkish citizen. "There are a whole lot of them," Azmy said. "The one problem the government could have with their release is that that it could be embarrassing for them."

Kurnaz, a Turkish citizen who was born and raised in the German city of Bremen, was arrested at the end of 2001 in Pakistan, where he claimed he had travelled to study the Koran. He was held in a camp in Afghanistan before being transferred to the Guantánamo Bay detention camp on Cuba in 2002.

Among the documents that Azmy is hoping to obtain is "R-19," a short unsubstantiated memo by an unidentified government official which claimed that Kurnaz had terrorist connections. The R-19 memo was enough for the Combatant Status Review Tribunal to rule in 2004 that Kurnaz was an enemy combatant and that he be detained at Guantanamo indefinitely. However, US District Judge Joyce Hens Green ruled in January 2005 that Kurnaz's imprisonment was illegal. It took until July 2006 before he was eventually released.

Azmy expects that a US federal court will rule on whether to release the R-19 memo by this summer at the earliest. He is also demanding the release of the transcripts of Kurnaz's several hearings before the military tribunals. The documents had been declassified for a time but have subsequently been reclassified. "They could provide the proof that the American government was already convinced of the innocence of my client in 2002," Azmy told the Tagesspiegel.

The Kurnaz case has put the German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier under immense political pressurein recent weeks. He is accused of preventing Kurnaz's release from the US military prison while chief of staff to former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder. Steinmeier denies that there was an official US offer to release Kurnaz in 2002. The embattled minister is due to appear before a parliamentary committee investigating the case on March 8.

smd/reuters/afp

For reasons of data protection and privacy, your IP address will only be stored if you are a registered user of Facebook and you are currently logged in to the service. For more detailed information, please click on the "i" symbol.

Post to other social networks:

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
•