BERLIN, Feb. 22 (UPI) -- A German security official Thursday refuted allegations that his agency forged files related to the case of former Guantanamo inmate Murat Kurnaz.
Walter Wilhelm, of the Bremen office of the Verfassungsschutz, a federal German agency tasked with monitoring extremists, called allegations that his agency has come up with incriminating material on Kurnaz "complete nonsense."
Wilhelm said his agency got wind of Kurnaz, who was born and raised in the northern German city of Bremen, after the man was arrested in Pakistan in late 2001. Wilhelm said the man's mother was worried that her son could have been radicalized by Islamic preachers in Pakistan.
She was worried that he could do "something that isn't right," Wilhelm said. His agency thus started to monitor the Bremen Islamist scene where Kurnaz had established contacts. Bremen agents believed Kurnaz traveled to Pakistan to fight alongside the Taliban, a suspicion that later proved to be false.
Wilhelm testified before a German parliamentary inquiry trying to establish why the former German government in late 2002 blocked a U.S. offer to release to Germany the Gunatanamo Bay prisoner Kurnaz, a German-Turkish man who was deemed innocent by U.S. and German intelligence agents.
After four and a half years in prison, Kurnaz was released from the U.S. military prison in Cuba last summer upon the intervention of German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
