Murat Kurnaz (born 19 March 1982) is a Turkish citizen and legal resident of Germany who was held in extrajudicial detention by the United States at its military base in Kandahar, Afghanistan and in the Guantanamo Bay detention camp at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, Cuba beginning in December 2001. He was tortured in both places. By early 2002, intelligence officials of the United States and Germany had concluded that accusations against Kurnaz were groundless.
According to the BBC, Germany refused to accept him at that time, although the US offered to release him. Kurnaz was detained and abused at Guantanamo for nearly five more years. He published a memoir of his experience, Five Years of My Life: An Innocent Man in Guantanamo in German in 2007; translations to other European languages and English followed. In 2008 he testified in US Congressional hearings about treatment of detainees at the camp. He and his family live in Germany.
Arrest in Pakistan
Murat Kurnaz was born in Bremen, Germany, and grew up there. He was considered a Turkish citizen because his parents were immigrants, but they had lived and worked in Germany for years. He was a legal German resident and married a Turkish woman in Germany. In October 2001 Kurnaz at age 19 traveled from Germany to Pakistan, hoping to study at the Mansura Center (which turned him down); he spent the next two months as a tablighi, a Muslim pilgrim sojourning from mosque to mosque. In December 2001, while Kurnaz was on a bus to the airport to return to Germany, Pakistani police at a checkpoint detained him. After questioning him for a few days, they turned him over to American soldiers. Later, Kurnaz learned that after its invasion of Afghanistan following the 9/11 attacks, the United States had distributed fliers there and in Pakistan promising "enough money to take care of your family, your village, your tribe for the rest of your life" as a bounty for suspected terrorists. Tribunal rules forbade Kurnaz from seeing or challenging his file.
The evidence against Kurnaz included his association with an alleged suicide bomber named Selcuk, who in Pakistan had traveled to the airport on the same bus with Kurnaz. In fact Selcuk had never been arrested nor involved in any bombing; he is married and lives in Germany with his family. His case was one of nearly 60 reviewed and coordinated by Judge Joyce Hens Green of the US Appeals Court for the District of Columbia.
In response, on 15 October 2004, the Department of Defense published 32 pages of unclassified documents related to his Combatant Status Review Tribunal. In 2005, Kurnaz's entire file was declassified, through a bureaucratic slip-up. During the brief window when it was declassified, in March 2005 the Washington Post reviewed all the evidence against him and published a summary.
The file documented that neither German nor United States Army investigators found any evidence of a tie between Kurnaz and Al-Qaeda, or involvement in any terrorist activities, and had concluded in 2002 that he should be released. A State Department spokesman said the prisoners were apparently not aware that one was to be transferred to Saudi Arabia, although to be held in custody there, and another was to be released to Saudi Arabia. Human rights groups and defense lawyers called for investigation.
The Naval Criminal Investigative Service conducted an investigation, releasing a heavily redacted report in 2008. In 2009 the law school at Seton Hall University released a study, alleging that DOD claimed the suicides in a coverup of homicides due to torture. In a joint investigation, reported in January 2010, Harper's Magazine and NBC News also alleged that the military had committed homicides in the course of torturing detainees and tried to cover up these three deaths.
Release in 2006
Kurnaz believes that he was finally released because of German government diplomatic pressure, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel's face-to-face appeal to American President Bush.
On 12 February 2006, Deutsche Welle reported that German authorities were negotiating Kurnaz's repatriation. The German magazine Focus reported in 2006 that the Bush administration was trying to tie the release of Kurnaz to Germany's agreeing to accept four other Guantanamo detainees. The USA had cleared approximately 120 detainees for release or transfer but many could not be returned to their countries of origin. The German and American governments denied that Kurnaz's release had been tied to Germany accepting other detainees.
Life in Germany after release
After his release, Kurnaz wrote and published his memoir Five Years of My Life: An Innocent Man in Guantanamo (2007). It was published in German, French, Norwegian, Danish, and Dutch in 2007. Excerpts were published serially by The Guardian beginning 23 April 2008, the same month that Palgrave Macmillan published an English translation of the book in the United States. A Polish translation was published in 2009. British author John le Carré described it in a blurb as "[t]he most compassionate, truthful, and dignified account of the disgrace of Guantanamo that you are ever likely to read."
Kurnaz cooperated in the German government's 2007 investigation of German soldiers who had interrogated him in Kandahar. According to articles by the United Press International, Deutsche Welle and Reuters, Kurnaz identified his interrogators from photos he was shown of members of the German military's KSK unit. The German Ministry of Defense initially had denied that KSK members were in Afghanistan at that time.
In 2007, a German Parliamentary inquiry undertook investigation of the extent to which German military and counter-terrorism authorities participated in the United States extraordinary rendition program. In the interview Kurnaz said that since his return to Germany, he has lived with his parents. He has a desk job, which he enjoys. He says he does not hold ordinary Americans responsible for the abuse he endured.