Guantanamo inmate set to return to Germany

BERLIN, Aug 19: A Turk with German residency held at the US prison camp in Guantanamo Bay since 2002 will be freed next week, German media reported today.

Weekly Der Spiegel and daily Financial Times Deutschland said that after months of talks between the US and German governments, a deal has been struck to release Murat Kurnaz, a Turkish national who was born in Germany in 1982.

They said he could be released as early as Tuesday and flown to Germany.

A spokeswoman in the German Foreign Ministry acknowledged the governments had been in talks on the matter but declined to comment on whether Kurnaz's release was imminent.

Dubbed the ''Bremen Taliban'' after the city in northern Germany where he lived, Kurnaz 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 charges.

It is not the first time that reports have said Kurnaz was set for release. In March, German Interior Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble said he would be freed soon.

Reuters