Doc. 11302 Report 273. We believe we have now managed to retrace in detail Mr El-Masri’s odyssey and to shed light on his return to Europe: if we, with neither the powers nor resources, were able to do so, why were the competent authorities unable to manage it? There is only one possible explanation: they are not interested in seeing the truth come out. 7.1.1. Exposing El-Masri’s secret “homeward rendition” to Europe 274. In addition to reporting on the system of secret detentions in Council of Europe member states, my inquiry also set out to shed light on one of the unsolved mysteries of the “global spider’s web”, captured by the following question: In the course of its covert operations, how does the CIA return home a detainee whom it concedes to have been an innocent victim of erroneous rendition and secret detention? 275. Our case study is that of the German citizen Khaled El-Masri, whose ordeal at the hands of the UBK217in “the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia” and the CIA in Afghanistan, from 1 January to 28 May 2004, I documented in comprehensive detail in my report last year.218We were able to prove the involvement of the CIA in Mr El-Masri’s transfer to Afghanistan by linking the flight that carried him there – on the aircraft N313P, flying from Skopje (“the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia”) to Baghdad (Iraq) to Kabul (Afghanistan) on 24 January 2004 – to another known CIA detainee transfer on the same plane two days earlier, thus establishing the first “rendition circuit”.219 276. Upon Mr El-Masri’s arrival in Afghanistan, he was taken to a CIA secret detention facility near Kabul and held in a “small, filthy, concrete cell”220for a period of over four months. During this period, the CIA discovered that no charges could be brought against him and that his passport was genuine,221but inexplicably kept Mr El-Masri in his squalid, solitary confinement for several weeks thereafter. 277. Mr El-Masri told us about his eventual release on 28 May 2004 in as much detail as he was able to recollect,222but there were naturally some important unanswered questions in his account, precisely because the CIA did not want him to know what was happening to him. Mr El-Masri was blindfolded throughout his return flight to Europe, immediately bundled into the back of a van upon arrival and driven for several hours “up and down mountains, on paved and unpaved roads”. The men who transported him in the van spoke a language he did not recognise. When his blindfold was eventually removed, Mr El-Masri found himself in unfamiliar, mountainous terrain, in the dark, and was instructed to walk along an isolated path without looking over his shoulder. He said he feared that he was “about to be shot in the back and left to die”, with nobody having any idea of how he had got there. 278. In the ensuing three years, Mr El-Masri’s case has been investigated and reported extensively, including by the Untersuchungsausschuss of the German Bundestag and by German prosecutors, both of which I shall address below. Yet a key piece of the jigsaw, namely the means by which Mr El-Masri was returned from Afghanistan to an unknown point in Europe,223has eluded investigators until now. 217. UBK stands for Uprava za Bezbednosti I Kontrarazuznavanje; it is the Security and Counter-Intelligence Service of “the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia”. 218. See the Marty report 2006, supra note 6, at pp. 25-32, paragraphs 92-132. 219. I used the phrase “rendition circuit” to describe consecutive detainee transfer operations by the same CIA-linked aircraft in quick succession. For more details, see the Marty report 2006, supra note 6, at pp. 18-19, paragraphs 52-55. Also see Appendix No. 1 to the same report, “Flight logs related to the Successive Rendition Operations of Binyam Mohamed and Khaled El-Masri in January 2004”. 220. For a full description of Khaled El-Masri’s ordeal in his own words, see Declaration of Khaled El-Masri in support of Plaintiff’s Opposition to the United States’ Motion to Dismiss, in El-Masri v. Tenet et al., Eastern District Court of Virginia in Alexandria, 6 April 2006 (hereinafter “El-Masri statement to United States Court in Alexandria, 6 April 2006”), available at http://www.aclu.org/pdfs/safefree/elmasri_decl_exh.pdf. 221. Several news media outlets have published insider accounts of the process by which the CIA learned of their mistake but failed to act to rectify it. See, for example, NBC Investigative Unit, “CIA accused of detaining innocent man – If the agency knew he was the wrong man, why was he held?” 21 April 2005. The article states: “In March [2004] … the CIA finally finished checking his passport and found it was not a fake … The CIA realised it had the wrong man, a genuine German citizen, in custody … Condoleezza Rice learned of the mistake and ordered El-Masri’s immediate release … But that didn’t end the case. About two weeks later, Rice learned El-Masri was still being held and ordered him released again. In late May [2004], he was finally freed.” 222. Our team has spent many hours meeting with Khaled El-Masri, notably between March and May 2006, during which he has courageously recounted his experiences to us. We have also met extensively with his German lawyer, Manfred Gnjidic, and his American attorneys at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in New York. We are grateful to all of them for their commitment and assistance to our inquiry. 54