BERLIN, March 1 (UPI) -- A hearing of a German parliamentary inquiry probing the case of a former Guantanamo inmate was canceled because Berlin refused to release key documents.
Thursday's session was due to hear testimonies of two top German intelligence chiefs, but the lawmakers sitting on the inquiry board unanimously voted to cancel it because of the government's refusal to release vital documents regarding former inmate Murat Kurnaz.
Even the two government lawmakers of the inquiry, Siegfried Kauder, of Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservatives, and Thomas Oppermann, of the Social Democrats -- the party that has most come under fire for alleged shortcomings to get Kurnaz released -- were angry.
"I want these files released as quickly as possible so that we can present them to the witnesses," Oppermann Thursday told German news channel n-tv.
The files are intelligence documents of the Bremen domestic spy agency tasked with monitoring extremists. The government claims these files prove that Kurnaz, a Turkish national who was born and raised in the northern German city of Bremen, was indeed a threat to German security.
The opposition believes the government is holding back the files because they don't really incriminate Kurnaz as a potential terrorist; such a revelation would hurt the former government, which has been accused of refusing a U.S. offer to release Kurnaz to Germany in the fall of 2002.
Kurnaz was arrested in Pakistan in late 2001 and spent four and a half years in the U.S. military Guantanamo Bay prison despite no proven links to terrorist groups. He was released last summer upon the intervention of German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
