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Polyneuropathy is a disease of the nervous system that causes tingling, burning, stinging and can lead to paralysis and organ disorders. It can be triggered by diabetes, but in one out of four cases the cause is unclear.
Khaled el-Masri has been suffering from the disease for nine months now. He says he can feel it in his legs and can't walk more than a hundred meters at a time. He has had to give up his job as a truck driver and spends most of his time in bed, like his wife, who has been suffering for years from inflammatory bowel disease. Masri recently turned 60, too young to be confined to a bed.

The article you are reading originally appeared in German in issue 29/2023 (July 15th, 2023) of DER SPIEGEL.
SPIEGEL InternationalHe isn't suffering from diabetes and doesn't know where the disease came from. The doctors aren't sure, but it might be connected to Masri's past, events that radically changed his life – when he was suspected of terrorism.
In 2003, the CIA abducted Masri, a Kuwaiti with Lebanese parents and German citizenship. He was on a bus to Macedonia at the time but was detained at the border and spent 23 days in a darkened hotel room in Skopje. After that, Masri says, he was brought to the airport and handed to a group of Americans cloaked in black. He says they forcibly stripped him, then photographed and tortured him before putting him on a jet blindfolded, with plugs in his ears.
He was taken to a secret CIA prison in Afghanistan, where he was made to undress and beaten. He says he had objects inserted into his rectum and was force-fed during a hunger strike. As a suspected terrorist, he was the subject of constant interrogation.
Masri experienced these things nearly 20 years ago and has spoken about them many times. But few people know about how this man, who has faced so many torments and fears, is doing today. How he is coming to terms with the injustices he faced and the question of why this happened to him, of all people. It's a question that has troubled him for two decades now. Along with the question of how it has changed him. Clearly not for the better.

Masri has come to a café in the student district of Graz, Austria, for a joint interview with DER SPIEGEL and the Austrian newspaper DER STANDARD and has brought a plastic tub with him. After an hour, he will fill it with water to cool his feet so they hurt less. His once long beard has been trimmed, his formerly long hair is short and has turned grey.
Back when he was in captivity, the CIA operatives took two months to determine that Masri's German passport was genuine. They had mistaken him for someone with the same name, believing they had caught a high-ranking al-Qaida terrorist. It took nearly three more months for Masri to be released, in the middle of the night in a forest in Albania. Until the last moment, he feared his captors would shoot him in the back.
A Political Issue
The scandal surrounding the abduction and torture of an innocent German citizen made headlines around the world and occupied lawyers politicians and journalists in Germany, the United States and elsewhere. In the context of George W. Bush's "Global War on Terror," it became a political issue and came to symbolize the erosion of morality and law. Masri became a significant political issue.
Today, though, his case has been closed, filed away and forgotten. Just not for Masri, not for his wife and not for their six children.
Many questions are still unanswered for Masri, who is convinced that the German authorities were also involved in the operation. He is demanding further investigation. And that he finally be given an apology.
At the café, Masri recounts the days of his release: He had to promise the Americans that he wouldn't speak to the authorities or the press. But he did turn to a lawyer who had been recommended to him – Manfred Gnjidic, a criminal defense lawyer from the southern German city of Ulm. Gnjidic took him to the police, where Masri gave a statement. Almost three years later, the Munich Public Prosecutor's Office issued 13 arrest warrants for CIA employees suspected of involvement in Masri's abduction. It was a minor sensation, but one that also brought satisfaction for Masri.
Short-lived satisfaction.

The arrest warrants were never executed; the German government at the time had no interest in doing so, just as it showed little overall commitment to the case. The information then emerged that Otto Schily, the German interior minister at the time with the center-left Social Democratic Party, had been informed about the mishap by the Americans shortly after Masri's release – and that he had apparently kept the information to itself.
Masri was largely left to his own devices over many years, even though psychological care was urgently needed. An attempt to provide treatment shortly after his release failed. The psychiatrist advised her client to withdraw from the public eye. But Masri didn't want that, and neither do his lawyer, so he stopped seeing the psychiatrist. Masri, who wanted justice, sought publicity.
A Committee of Inquiry in the German Parliament
In 2006, he could be seen in Washington, D.C., alongside his American attorneys Steven Watt and Ben Wizner, who were trying to push through a lawsuit against the CIA with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), a human rights organization. Masri demanded an apology from the U.S. government but attempts to obtain judicial success failed in all instances. A public trial, the top judges argued, would compromise state secrets.
That same year, a committee of inquiry in the federal parliament looking into Germany's foreign intelligence service, the BND, met in Berlin to investigate several incidents at the agency, including whether German authorities had been involved in the Masri case. The answer didn't arrive until three years later. The committee of inquiry concluded that "German agencies were neither directly nor indirectly involved in Masri's arrest and abduction." To this day, though, Masri has doubts about this finding. He also has his reasons.
When he was released from the torture jail in 2004, he was initially handled by a man who introduced himself as "Sam" and spoke fluent German, Masri claims. The suspicion is that the man was linked to a German authority.

A search began for "Sam." The name of an officer with the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) circulated, and Masri recognized him in pictures and in a police lineup in the city of Neu-Ulm. Masri said at the time that he "wasn't 100-percent certain" it was him, which didn't go far enough for prosecutors. Moreover, the official had an alibi for the day in question, and "Sam" remained untraceable.
Filmmaker Stefan Eberlein, who researched an in-depth documentary about the case, later determined that the alibi may not have been one at all, and that it would do nothing to exonerate the BKA official. But interest in such details had long since died out, and few were still following Masri's case.
Trauma of the nature Masri experienced could lead to "complex post-traumatic stress disorder," and in extreme cases, to "permanent personality change," says psychologist Nora Ramirez of Hemayat, a center for trauma therapy care and the treatment of torture and war survivors in Vienna.
A Distrustful Attitude Toward the World
Ramirez stresses that she cannot make a serious diagnosis without meeting with the man personality, but symptoms of this personality change, such as a hostile or distrustful attitude toward the world, social withdrawal, feelings of emptiness or hopelessness, could apply to Masri.
Three years after his experience being tortured, Masri set fire to an electronics store; and two years after that, he beat up the mayor of Neu-Ulm in his office. These kinds of outbursts that also shook the people who trusted him. Even Manfred Gnjidic couldn't get through to Masri in the end. He hasn't spoken to the lawyer since the attack on the mayor.

Public perceptions of Masri began to shift: The torture victim had suddenly become a perpetrator. "Why are we allowing ourselves to be terrorized by someone like that?" asked the German tabloid newspaper Bild? "Turns out he's cuckoo after all!"
"Pushed To the Edge"
Masri says he avoids Germany now that he no longer has any connection to the country that abandoned him during the most difficult phase of his life. In the end, he felt harassed and provoked by the German authorities, which he says caused him to lose his composure.
Masri justifies the attack on the mayor today by saying he had been "pushed to the edge" at the time. He also blames the former city leader in part for his own fate. He claims the politician made an effort to ensure that Neu-Ulm was portrayed as a hotspot for Islamists in a way that could have helped place Masri onto the radar of Western intelligence services because he prayed together with such men in his mosque.
Anyone who listens to Masri today can sense how fresh the experiences still are in his mind today. His eyes water and his voice cracks as he speaks. When, for example, he describes his release from prison after his term of four and a half years for the attack on the mayor and another assault – and how his wife and children had fled to his former home country, Lebanon, out of fear that she might lose custody of her children.
Masri sought out a new place to live, which took him to Vienna. Completely destitute, his only option was homelessness. Later, he moved on to Graz, where he saw his family again after eight years. When his sons walked past him at the airport, he says, he didn't recognize them at first.
"There are no laws to compensate torture victims."
Marlene Moss, a supporter of Masri
It wasn't until 2012 that Masri first had success in court. Eight years after his abduction, the European Court of Human Rights ordered Macedonia to pay Masri 60,000 euros in damages for pain and suffering. The court considered it proven that Macedonian authorities had illegally detained Masri and handed him over to the CIA. The money helped Masri and his family get by, but only for a while.
Masri opened a store selling Middle Eastern food in Graz, but the shop closed again after two and half years because of competition. He found a job as a driver, but then he fell ill, another setback. "I am convinced I am living an irreparably damaged life," Masri wrote in a text describing his emotional state.
Today, he lives on 43.31 euros in sickness benefits per day and 600 euros in family allowance per month, not even enough to cover the rent, he says. The family's debts continue to grow, he says, which leads to even more stress and problems. The other day, Masri says, he was in court for his debts, which were eventually covered by a special fund. It's one of those rare bits of good news in his life.
Marlene Moss is probably the only person who hasn't yet given up fighting for Masri's cause. She stumbled onto his story at a lecture she attended. Today, the 73-year-old, who has a degree in education, regularly protests in front of the constituency office of Luise Amtsberg, a Green Party politician and the German government's human rights commissioner.
"The assumption is that there is no torture in Germany, and that's why there are no laws to compensate torture victims," Moss says. The Masri family, she says, is still suffering today from the consequences of the kidnapping and that they need to be provided with support. "There's the matter, for example, of entitlement to normal pension benefits," which Masri is ineligible for because of the consequences of torture.
Currently, Masri's older sons support their parents financially, but more help is urgently needed, Moss says. "It is a crime how Germany is dealing with Mr. Masri," Moss finds. "They sacrificed him for the sake of relations with the United States."
"Masri did not lose the case in the sense that the courts didn't find his claims credible."
Ben Wizner, American attorney
What has been learned 20 years after this case, and what has not?
"I always had full confidence that the state would follow up on a serious crime," says Gnjidic, the lawyer from Ulm. "Today, I stand on the sidelines and marvel at the unofficial politics that go on alongside official politics."
"Masri is a pretty famous precedent that proves that the CIA can commit human rights violations, declare them a state secret and escape any responsibility based on that declaration alone," says Ben Wizner of Masri's legal team. "Masri did not lose the case in the sense that the courts didn't find his claims credible."
"I don't have the strength to pursue it any further," Masri says today. "My body is no longer cooperating. I lie in bed like a mummy."