Though the Pakistani Supreme Court ordered Nasir released without charge, he was arrested upon return to Germany in August 2007. The ISI had sent German authorities three reports— on grainy, loose-leaf paper, with no letterhead or signature—on Nasir in June. Each report states at the top “From: Friends, To: Friends” and is tagged at the end: “We assure you our fullest support, with best regards.”109 The German court order in early August authorizing a police search of Nasir’s house, while he was still in unlawful ISI detention, appears to have been based on information from the ISI and the report of the consular official who visited Nasir in detention.110 The trial court correctly excluded the ISI reports as evidence against Nasir, citing article 15 of the Convention against Torture, but allowed evidence obtained through the August 2007 house search as well as the testimony of the consular official.111 Torture evidence may also have been used in the administrative naturalization hearings for Abdel-Halim Khafagy, a long-term German resident originally from Egypt. Khafagy was arrested in 2001 in Bosnia-Herzegovina and detained at a US military base in Tuzla called “Eagle base.” Two BKA officers traveled to BiH to question Khafagy, but ultimately refused to do so in light of concerns about the conditions and treatment at Eagle base. Khafagy was released and eventually returned to Germany. At administrative hearings in Munich in 2004 to examine his application for German citizenship, German authorities referenced information Khafagy was alleged to have provided while detained at Eagle base which suggested he had links with terrorism.112 The information from interviews conducted by German law enforcement personnel in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, referenced above, was introduced in the preliminary hearings in the case against four men—three German citizens (one of Turkish origin) and one Turkish national who grew up in Germany—accused in Germany of membership in the IJU and of plotting terrorist attacks on US targets in Germany. The trial of the so-called Sauerland cell (named after the region in which they lived), which began in April 2009, took a dramatic turn in June when the four men pleaded guilty to all charges. According to one of the defense lawyers, the presiding trial judge agreed to exclude the statements from those interviews in his mandatory review of the evidence against the accused following their confessions, 109 Christoph Scheuermann and Holger Stark, “Unter Freunden,” Der Spiegel, April 6, 2009, http;//wissen.spiegel.de/wissen/dokument/dokument.html?id=64949397&top=SPIEGEL (accessed September 17, 2009). 110 “Glimpses of a Shadowy World in Pakistan”, The New York Times, September 24, 2007. 111 OLG Koblenz, Urteil vom 13.07.2009 - 2 StE 6/08 - 8. On file with Human Rights Watch. 112 Florian Geyer, “Fruit of the Poisonous Tree: Member States’ Indirect Use of Extraordinary Rendition and the EU Counterterrorism Strategy,” CEPS Working Document No. 263/April 2007, http://www.ceps.be/files/book/1487.pdf (accessed February 25, 2010), p. 6. “No Questions Asked” 40