BERLIN, Feb. 23 (UPI) -- A top German security official says there was reason to believe that former Guantanamo inmate Murat Kurnaz posed a security risk to take him back in 2002.
Heinz Fromm, head of the Verfassungsschutz, a federal German agency tasked with monitoring extremists, said his agency has had reason to believe that Kurnaz was "a potentially dangerous extremist."
Fromm added he had reason to believe that Kurnaz, who was arrested in Pakistan in late 2001, didn't travel there for religious reasons.
The security official was testifying 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.
Fromm said that this assessment hadn't changed when Kurnaz was released from the U.S. military prison in Cuba after four and a half years last summer upon the intervention of German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
"You mean Frau Merkel acted against your advice?" Max Stadler, an inquiry member of the Free Democrats, asked him.
"Our cognitions hadn't changed," Fromm replied.
