Khalid El-Masri

Khaled El-Masri (also Khalid El-Masri and Khaled Masri, Levantine Arabic pronunciation:, 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 was a mistake and released him.

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.

He is believed to be among an estimated 3,000 detainees, including several key leaders of al Qaeda, whom the CIA captured from 2001 to 2005, in its campaign to dismantle terrorist networks.

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.

The Macedonian authorities contacted the local CIA station, who in turn contacted the agency's headquarters in Langley, Virginia.

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.

When the Macedonian officials released El-Masri on 23 January 2004, American security officers immediately kidnapped 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.

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 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.

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.

According to a report by the inspector general of the CIA, El-Masri's German passport was not examined for authenticity until three months into his detention.

Upon examination, the CIA's Office of Technical Services swiftly concluded it was genuine and that his continued detention would be unjustified.

Discussion over what to do with El-Masri included secretly transporting him back to Macedonia and dumping him there without informing German authorities, and denying any claims he made.

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.

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.

El-Masri was born in Kuwait to Lebanese parents.

He grew up in Lebanon.