Murat Kurnaz

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.

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.

Kurnaz says "a great number of men wound up in Guantánamo as a result."

One of Kurnaz's interrogators at Guantanamo confirmed that he had been "sold" for a $3,000 bounty.

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.

After finally being released, Kurnaz wrote a memoir of his years at Guantanamo, which was published in German in 2007 and in English the following year.

The following sections contain mostly material from his account.

He said that he was chained to the floor of an aircraft with other prisoners and kicked and beaten by US soldiers during a flight to Kandahar.

Upon his arrival, although his head was covered with a sack, he could make out soldiers filming and photographing them.

Later the US released such photos to the media as "evidence" of his capture in the Afghanistan war zone, although Kurnaz and all the prisoners had just been flown in from Pakistan.

US soldiers stripped Kurnaz naked, and threw him into an outdoor barbed wire pen with about twenty other prisoners.

The prisoners were left exposed to freezing cold, rain and snow.

The soldiers threw over the fence some MREs ("Meals Ready to Eat") that had been opened and stripped of most of their contents.

Kurnaz estimated they received less than 600 calories per day; human beings need more than 1,500 calories to survive.

During interrogations US soldiers would ask a question such as "where is Osama?"

and punch him in the face when he said he didn't know.

"Hour upon hour, they repeated the same questions accompanied by punches and kicks," Kurnaz recalled in his memoirs.

The interrogators refused to believe his protestations of innocence.

He saw seven soldiers using rifle butts to beat another prisoner to death.

The abuse of Kurnaz escalated to include electric shock prods applied to the soles of his feet, until the unendurable pain caused him to pass out.

His head was repeatedly pushed into a bucket of water until he blacked out from lack of oxygen.

He was taken to a building where he was attached to a pulley from the ceiling, suspended by handcuffs on his wrists and hoisted off his feet, left there to dangle hour after hour.

Each time he was let down, a uniformed officer with a patch on his chest that said "doctor" examined him and took his pulse, said "okay," and the soldiers hoisted him back up again.

They also hung him up backwards, with his hands bound behind his back.

Kurnaz is not sure how long he was suspended by his arms, but other prisoners informed him it was five days.

Later he learned that this hanging treatment had killed prisoners at the Bagram base; he believes a prisoner in the room next to his died from being hung up by his arms.

Soldiers with uniforms showing the German flag, who identified themselves as German KSK, special forces, came to interrogate him.

Kurnaz hoped they would have to make a report, which would let German authorities and eventually his family know that he was being held at Kandahar.

In 2008 he testified in US Congressional hearings about treatment of detainees at the camp.

He and his family live in Germany.

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.