BERLIN: German lawmakers yesterday accused the former government of ex-chancellor Gerhard Schroeder of allowing a German-born Turk to languish at Guantanamo Bay for years despite a US offer to return him.

Deputies from opposition parties and the conservative bloc of current chancellor Angela Merkel serving on a parliamentary committee investigating Murat Kurnaz’s case demanded to know why Schroeder’s government apparently failed to take action on his behalf.

Kurnaz was seized by US forces in Pakistan shortly after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the US and was later sent to a US prison in Afghanistan before being incarcerated at the Guantanamo Bay lock-up in 2002.

He was released last August because of a lack of proof that he had belonged to a terrorist organisation, after repeated appeals by Merkel to the US government after she took power in November 2005.

Kurnaz, who is also expected to testify before the committee, said he was repeatedly abused while in custody, undergoing beatings and electric shocks and being chained to a ceiling for days.

Committee chairman Siegfried Kauder said there was "evidence" that Schroeder’s administration had received a clear US offer late in 2002 to send Kurnaz home to Germany but that it had refused.

Wolfgang Neskovic of the Left Party said the government had made a "deeply inhumane decision that must have legal consequences, not just political".

And Max Stadler of the pro-business Free Democrats called the affair a horrifying case of "one innocent person trapped in the wheels of injustice".

However, Thomas Oppermann of Schroeder’s Social Democrats dismissed the accusations, saying there was no evidence in government files to show the US had made a formal offer to return Kurnaz.

Kurnaz’s lawyer Bernhard Docke told the committee that former foreign minister Joschka Fischer of the Greens party had replied to a request for help in February 2002 saying that the fact that Kurnaz was a Turkish citizen made it difficult to act on his behalf, even though he was born and raised here.

But members of the Social Democrats and the Greens insisted that Fischer had taken his case up with his then US counterpart Colin Powell to no avail.

A separate parliamentary committee and state prosecutors are probing Kurnaz’s claim that German special forces in Afghanistan had beaten him before he was transferred to Guantanamo Bay. – AFP