25/08/2006
BERLIN, Aug 24 (Reuters) - A Turk with German residency held at the U.S. prison camp in Guantanamo Bay has been released and was handed over to German authorities at Ramstein, U.S. Air Force Base in Germany on Thursday, his lawyer said. "Finally after 4-3/4 years of martyrdom, of torture, and deprivation of rights, the news has arrived -- Mr. (Murat) Kurnaz is free," Kurnaz's German lawyer, Bernhard Docke, said. Docke said he would brief reporters on Friday in Kurnaz's hometown of Bremen in northern Germany. Kurnaz will not attend as he is with his family and needs time to adjust to his freedom, he said. "He will undergo medical treatment and will not be appearing in public," Docke said. "Mr Kurnaz has been through hell." "What we saw was just an overwhelming human moment, an overjoyed weeping mother and her son," said Baher Azmy, a Seton Hall University law professor who served as a defense attorney for Kurnaz and was present for his client's arrival in Germany. Kurnaz's lawyers said U.S. officials had asked Germany to place Kurnaz under surveillance and open a criminal investigation of him as a condition of his release, but relented in the end. "There will be no criminal charges, no criminal investigation," said Azmy, the defense counsel. "He's a completely free man." Earlier, German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said an agreement on the release of Kurnaz had come after the successful conclusion of long negotiations between the U.S. and German governments. Dubbed the "Bremen Taliban", Kurnaz, born in Germany in 1982, was in the process of becoming a German citizen when he was arrested in Pakistan in late 2001. He was taken from there to Guantanamo on Cuba, where the United States is holding hundreds it suspects of backing Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda or Afghanistan's radical Islamist Taliban. Kurnaz has said he has suffered abuse at Guantanamo and interrogation techniques including sexual humiliation, water torture and the desecration of Islam. The United States has come under criticism from human rights and some of its allies for holding some 450 foreign guerrilla suspects at the naval base in Cuba, many for four years or more and without charge
SOURCE: Retuers and Washington Post
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