BERLIN, Jan. 26 (UPI) -- Germany's foreign minister said he won't resign over intensifying accusations that he blocked a U.S. offer to release an innocent Guantanamo Prison inmate.
In addition to saying his resignation was "not open for debate," Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier rejected media claims that he or anyone in the former government of Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder was responsible for extending German-Turkish Murat Kurnaz's stay in the U.S. military prison.
Yet that statement, which he made in an interview Friday with German daily Bild, is contested by several newspapers with access to internal intelligence and government documents.
The Berliner Zeitung newspaper Friday quoted from documents proving that in October 2002, the Chancellor's office, at the time headed by Steinmeier, and the Interior Ministry had agreed not to allow Kurnaz to return to Germany, even though he was deemed innocent by U.S. and German intelligence sources. To actively block his return to Germany, they planned to revoke his residence permit, because once in Germany, Kurnaz could have gone to court to appeal for permanent residency.
"The thin evidence of a terrorist background would provoke a long legal confrontation while the foreigner lives in Germany," the paper quoted an internal letter from the Interior Ministry.
Steinmeier in the Bild interview said Germany at the time did all it could to free the man. "None of us wanted to let him stew in Guantanmo," he said. But he added the German government at the time was focused on protecting the country's security after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks in the United States.
Kurnaz ended up spending four and a half years in Guantanamo before he was released on German Chancellor Angela Merkel's intervention in August 2006.
A parliamentary inquiry is currently probing whether the former German government did enough to free the innocent inmate, and Steinmeier is expected to testify before the inquiry within the next few months.
