Murat Kurnaz
| Murat Kurnaz | |
|---|---|
| Born |
March 19, 1982 Bremen, Germany |
| Detained at | Kandahar Internment Facility, Guantanamo |
| ISN | 61 |
| Status | Transferred to Germany |
Murat Kurnaz (born March 19, 1982 Bremen, Germany) is a Turkish citizen and 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. Nonetheless he 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 2007 and testified in U S Congressional hearings. He and his family are now living in Germany.
In October 2001 Kurnaz 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 Moslem pilgrim sojourning from mosque to mosque. In December 2001 on his way to the airport to return to Germany, Pakistani police at a checkpoint took him off a bus, and subsequently turned him over to American soldiers. Later Kurnaz learned that the United States had distributed fliers 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'd been sold for a $3,000 bounty.
Kurnaz was chained to the floor of an aircraft with other prisoners and kicked and beaten by US soldiers on the flight to Kandahar. Upon his arrival at Kandahar from beneath a sack over his head 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—even though he 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 MRE's ("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 over 1,500 calories to survive.
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