German prosecutors have launched an investigation over a magazine report claiming CIA agents and employees of a notorious US private security firm had sought to assassinate a German-Syrian terror suspect.
Berlin on Monday denied any knowledge of the CIA’s operation, several days after the report’s publication in Vanity Fair just before Christmas.
The controversy centers around claims that the American intelligence agency and the Blackwater, renamed Xe, private security firm sent a covert assassination team to Hamburg in 2004 to spy on and liquidate 51-year-old businessman Mamoun Darkazanli.
The report also alleges that aside from regular CIA agents, German authorities and lawmakers had also been kept in the dark.
Darkazanli is believed to have had contact with several of the terrorists involved in the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York since they lived or studied in the northern German port city.
For five years after the 2001 tragedy, police investigated Darkazanli’s alleged terror links with several of the terrorists involved in 9/11 attacks. The probe was closed due to lack of any incriminating evidence.
While CIA’s tactics have long been criticized amid accusations of torturing terror suspects in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, Blackwater is perhaps the world’s most notorious private military contractor, haunted by claims of brutality and aggression.
The company is accused of bribery and the voluntary manslaughter in Iraq.
While the issue has united the coalition government as well as the opposition in condemnation of a murder plot against a German citizen, Hans-Christian Strobele, a prominent German Green Party politician, criticized Berlin for not confronting the CIA.
“The fact is that the CIA can, for the most part, do whatever it wants here in Germany… The secret prisoner transports after Sept. 11 showed that and no one dared to do anything about it, ” he said. “Try to imagine the opposite happening.”
“Imagine if the BND (Germany’s federal intelligence agency) were to carry out a hit job via a front company, say in New Orleans. It would be a shocking occurrence,” said the parliamentarian.
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