The story sounds so crazy that the Ulm lawyer Manfred Gnjidic cannot believe it at first. The Americans are not kidnapping a German citizen from Lebanon to Afghanistan and torturing him there in a secret prison. Some of the agents realize early on that they seem to have kidnapped the wrong guy, but others insist that the man is evil. After four months they finally realized: everything was confused with a name, they fly him to Albania and leave him on a footpath in the forest at night. Gnjidic laughs in the Arte documentary The El-Masri case short. “As a young lawyer you come from university, you have heard a lot about the high law and how everything works under the rule of law among the nations. A state-coordinated kidnapping story – until then I couldn’t imagine that there was such a thing.”
But there was this man in his office in the early summer of 2004, with rampant curls and a wild beard, crying, agitated, trembling and telling us that he had only been detained by American secret agents in a hotel in Macedonia for 23 days. Then the now unfortunately well-known American torture setting was used, diaper, sports suit, blindfold, hood, bondage and departure to Kabul. A hole-like cell, drinking foul water, a hunger strike and the announcement that he will not be able to get out of here in 20 years. At the end of his hair-raising story, the man Gnjidic showed his German passport, in which there was no exit stamp from Macedonia. But five months later one from Albania. “Then I knew something was wrong,” says Gnjidic.
Stefan Eberlein had to stop filming when al-Masri committed a criminal offense
Khaled al-Masri. The case caused quite a stir at the time. Front page of the New York Times, Committees of inquiry in Germany and the USA. A super-GAU for Bush’s hawks as well as for the German government, which is absolutely silent and leaves al-Masri hanging. Then there are the first suspicious programs and newspaper articles. “It was not by chance that this man came into the crosshairs of the American authorities,” said detective officer Klaus Jansen in an infamous 2006 Report Mainz-Contribution. the image incites against him anyway. In 2007 al-Masri went crazy and set a fire in a wholesale market in Ulm. He can finally be dragged through the boulevard ring as a criminal. In 2009 he beat up the mayor of Ulm, believing that he was the representative of the state that had left him alone for so long. “So crazy,” she sneered image. He spent five years in prison.
The documentary filmmaker Stefan Eberlein had just started to make a film about his story with al-Masri. The whole thing had to be stopped when al-Masri became a criminal. At the time it was quite a disaster for Eberlein, who had put a lot of research and money into the project. For us viewers, however, it is very lucky, because the film that is now being broadcast so many years later is gaining a depth of field that it could not have had at the time: In 2016, Eberlein found a CIA document that had just been published online while googling in 2016 , an internal investigation report from 2007 in which the secret service wrote that Khaled al-Masri had been wrongly kidnapped at the time and that there were no grounds for suspicion against him. Eberlein was taken aback. “That was the official rehabilitation, but not a single newspaper reported about it.” The two met again in 2017, al-Masri had meanwhile left Germany and ran a small supermarket in Graz.
“He had gotten very old,” says one of his sons in the Graz supermarket
The film has two major strengths. On the one hand, he presents the material excellently and thereby asks probing questions: What did the German government know? Why the hell did she hand over the warrant for the arrest of the American kidnappers whose names the panorama-Editorial exposed, not to the US government? Why was the public prosecutor’s office bugging al-Masri’s attorney Gnjidic? Eberlein holds talks with Gnjidic, but also with the investigative detective at the time, the Munich public prosecutor, who plays a strange role to say the least, and with Dick Marty, the Swiss public prosecutor and special rapporteur for the Council of Europe, who found out in the course of his investigations into the al-Masri case that the CIA had kept secret prisons for terror suspects in Poland and Romania for years. “Something broke in me,” says Marty in the film. “How can EU leaders give nice speeches about human rights, and then if the US so wishes, all these principles are thrown overboard?”
Still disturbed by the events: al-Masri with his wife.
(Photo: Thomas Bresinsky / Arte)
On the other hand, Eberlein shows the devastation al-Masri’s kidnapping wreaked on his entire family. The grief seems to hang like heavy wet laundry on the bodies of all family members when al-Masri’s wife in the small kitchen in Graz talks about how she moved back to Lebanon with the children after her husband’s disappearance without a trace, not knowing where he was for months was and whether he was even still alive. Al-Masri sits next to her and is repeatedly shaken by crying. In the supermarket in Graz, one of the sons tells how they first saw their father again in 2016, after his imprisonment, after their time in Lebanon, and how they initially no longer recognized each other. “He had gotten very old.” The boy looks at the shelves as if that were the answer to how it can be that the US secret services, together with the federal government, have made half-orphans of him and his siblings for years.
Almost two decades have passed since the kidnapping. North Macedonia apologized formally to Khaled al-Masri and paid him 60,000 euros. The US never contacted him. But Germany’s behavior was most shameful, simply by never commenting on the case as a country, even though this story happened to one of its citizens. No politician has ever apologized. Although they cheated or outright lied, first and foremost the allegedly correct Interior Minister Otto Schily, who was informed of the case by the then US Ambassador Dan Coats on Whit Monday 2004, right after al-Masri’s release. After three years of work, the committee of inquiry came to the conclusion that al-Masri had “been given immediate aid at all levels” at the time. “The interior minister’s behavior was correct (…) Al-Masri did not suffer any disadvantages.”
The el-Masri case, Arte, 10:20 p.m., or in the Arte media library.