Khalid El-Masri

On 13 December 2012, El-Masri won an Article 34 case at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. The court determined he had been tortured while held by CIA agents and ruled that Macedonia was responsible for abusing him while in the country, and knowingly transferring him to the CIA when torture was a possibility. It awarded him compensation. This marked the first time that CIA activities against detainees was legally declared as torture. The European Court condemned nations for collaborating with the United States in these secret programs.

On December 13, 2012, the Grand Chamber for the European Court of Human Rights issued a ruling, finding that El-Masri's account of his abduction, rendition and torture "was established beyond reasonable doubt" and that Macedonia "had been responsible for his torture and ill-treatment both in the country itself and after his transfer to the U.S. authorities in the context of an extra-judicial rendition." It awarded El-Masri 60,000 Euros in compensation. The Court termed El-Masri's abduction, detention and torture in Macedonia, and subsequent rendition to Afghanistan, a forced disappearance. The Court stated that El-Masri's allegations were supported by previous investigations into flight logs, as well as forensic evidence about his physical condition.

On September 11, 2009, El-Masri was arrested after attacking Gerold Noerenberg, the mayor of Neu-Ulm. Shortly before the attack El-Masri tried to meet Noerenberg, but was prevented from entering the office and sent off by the police. He then took three of his six children with him, stormed the office and struck Noerenberg repeatedly in the face and threw a chair after him. He was arrested two hours after the attack in Senden. He confessed the attack, but kept silent about the motives at the time. Writing from his cell, he complained about the increasing licensing of brothels by the city, one of which he said desecrated a Muslim prayer room. He was sentenced to two years' imprisonment on 30 March 2010. His lawyer, Manfred Gnjidic, explained that El-Masri believed he was pursued by the secret services, trying to break or recruit him, and he intended to file an appeal.

On May 17, 2007, El-Masri was arrested on suspicion of arson. According to Die Welt Online, the problem arose over a dispute over an iPod that El-Masri had bought at a METRO warehouse club store back in April in the Bavarian city of Neu-Ulm. He claimed the iPod malfunctioned just hours after purchase. When he tried to return it, the store refused, and the situation escalated into a shouting match. El-Masri spat in the face of a female employee, and was barred from the store. On May 17, 2007, El-Masri kicked in a door of the Metro store and used gasoline to start a fire. The fire caused almost €90,000 in damages. Nobody was hurt. El-Masri was arrested near the scene of the crime. After arrest, a judge ordered him held in a psychiatric hospital. On May 18, El-Masri's attorney, Manfred Gnjidic, conceded his client did set fire to the store, but blamed it on his client's torture experiences and claimed that the German government did not provide enough therapy to him after his return from Afghanistan. He had actually requested extended therapy for his client shortly before the incident, as El-Masri stated he felt threatened, and believed himself to be pursued by cars and strangers. He stated the act of arson was executed on impulse and could not have led to a larger fire. While the courts recognized that El-Masri had never breached the law before his CIA abduction, and ruled that he had been traumatized, they also stated that this did not now justify acts of violence. He received a suspended sentence.

After his release, in 2006 El-Masri wrote in the Los Angeles Times that, while held by the CIA in Afghanistan, he was beaten and repeatedly interrogated. He also said that his custodians forcibly inserted an object into his anus. He was kept in a bare, squalid cell, given only meager rations to eat and putrid water to drink.

While imprisoned in Afghanistan, Masri befriended several other detainees. The men memorized each other's telephone numbers so that if one was released, he could contact the families of the others. According to the New York Times, Laid Saidi, an Algerian who was a former detainee, was released in 2006. His description of his abduction and detention closely matched that of El-Masri.

El-Masri reports that Majid Khan, characterized by the Bush administration as a high-value detainee, was held in the Salt Pit at the same time as he was. Khan, a former resident of Catonsville, Maryland, US was held by the CIA for an additional three and a half years prior to being transferred to US military custody and Guantanamo on 5 September 2006.

The Macedonian authorities contacted the local CIA station, who in turn contacted the agency's headquarters in Langley, Virginia. According to a 4 December 2005, article in the Washington Post, CIA agents discussed whether they should remove El-Masri from Macedonia in an extraordinary rendition. The decision to do so was made by the head of the al Qaeda division of the CIA's Counter-Terrorism Center, Alfreda Frances Bikowsky, on the basis of "a hunch" that El-Masri was involved in terrorism; his name was similar to suspected terrorist Khalid al-Masri.

In 2005, a German prosecutor started aiding El-Masri to validate his case. Using isotope analysis, scientists at the Bavarian archive for geology in Munich analyzed his hair; they verified that he was malnourished during his disappearance.

In May 2004, the U.S. Ambassador to Germany, Daniel R. Coats, convinced the German interior minister, Otto Schily, not to press charges or to reveal the program. El-Masri filed suit against the CIA for his arrest, extraordinary rendition and torture. In 2006, his suit El Masri v. Tenet, in which he was represented by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), was dismissed by the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, based on the U.S. government's claiming the state secrets privilege. The ACLU said the Bush administration attempted to shield its abuses by invoking this privilege. The case was also dismissed by the Appeals Court for the Fourth Circuit, and in December 2007, the United States Supreme Court declined to hear the case.

When the Macedonian officials released El-Masri on 23 January 2004, American security officers immediately took him into custody and detained him. El-Masri later described them as members of a "black snatch team." They beat him and sedated him for transport using a rectal suppository. "The CIA stripped, hooded, shackled and sodomized el-Masri with a suppository—in CIA parlance, subjected him to "capture shock"—as Macedonian officials stood by." He was dressed in a diaper and a jumpsuit, with total sensory deprivation, and flown to Baghdad, then immediately to the "Salt Pit", a black site or covert CIA interrogation center, in Afghanistan. It also held CIA prisoners from Pakistan, Tanzania, Yemen and Saudi Arabia.

In March 2004, El-Masri took part in a hunger strike, demanding that his captors afford him due process or watch him die. After 27 days without eating, he forced a meeting with the prison director and a CIA officer known as "The Boss". They conceded he should not be imprisoned but refused to release him. El-Masri continued his hunger strike for 10 more days until he was force-fed and given medical attention. He had lost more than 60 pounds (27 kg) since his abduction in Skopje.

In April 2004, CIA Director George Tenet was told by his staff that El-Masri was being wrongfully detained. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice learned of the German citizen's detention in early May and ordered his release. Shortly before El-Masri was released, in May 2004 the US ambassador to Germany informed the government for the first time of his detention. The ambassador asked the interior minister Otto Schily not to disclose the events, as the US feared "exposure of a covert action program designed to capture terrorism suspects abroad and transfer them among countries, and possible legal challenges to the CIA from Mr Masri and others with similar allegations." El-Masri was released on 28 May 2004 following a second order from Rice.

At the end of 2003, El-Masri travelled from his home in Ulm to go on a short vacation in Skopje. He was detained by Macedonian border officials on 31 December 2003, because his name was identical (except for variations in Roman transliteration) to that of Khalid al-Masri, who was being sought as an alleged mentor to the al-Qaeda Hamburg cell, and because of suspicion that El-Masri's German passport was a forgery. He was held in a motel in Macedonia for over three weeks and questioned about his activities, his associates, and the mosque he attended in Ulm.

He immigrated to Germany in the 1980s during the Lebanese civil war, where he applied for political asylum, based on his membership in the Islamic Unification Movement. Which had fought against the Lebanese government during the war years. He was granted asylum. In 1994 he obtained German citizenship through a previous marriage with a German woman, whom he later divorced. In 1996, El-Masri married a Lebanese woman in Ulm, Germany. They have had five children together.

Khaled El-Masri (also Khalid El-Masri and Khaled Masri, Levantine Arabic pronunciation: [ˈxaːlɪd elˈmɑsˤɾi, -ˈmɑsˤɾe] , Arabic: خالد المصري ‎) (born 29 June 1963) is a German and Lebanese citizen who was mistakenly abducted by the Macedonian police in 2003, and handed over to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). While in CIA custody, he was flown to Afghanistan, where he was held at a black site and routinely interrogated, beaten, strip-searched, sodomized, and subjected to other cruel forms of inhumane and degrading treatment and torture. After El-Masri held hunger strikes, and was detained for four months in the "Salt Pit", the CIA finally admitted his arrest and torture were a mistake and released him. He is believed to be among an estimated 3,000 detainees whom the CIA abducted from 2001–2005.