Bavaria Shuts Down Al-Masri's Mosque

Freistaat Bayern, the German equivalent of Texas, has refreshingly little patience with jihadi plots and their tiresome taqqiya. Predictably, the joint was known as the Multi-Kultur Haus.

The state government of Bavaria said Wednesday it was shutting down the Multi-Kultur-Haus association in the southern town of Neu-Ulm after it seized material urging Muslims to carry out suicide attacks in Iraq.

Khaled al-Masri, a Kuwait-born German citizen who is suing the CIA for allegedly spiriting him to Afghanistan for interrogation, has said he visited the center several times before he was snatched.

More precisely, this "German man" was born in Kuwait to Lebanese parents, emigrating to Germany at age 22 in 1985.

Al-Masri said he was taken while trying to enter Macedonia on New Year's Eve 2003 ["on holiday"] and flown to Afghanistan, where he was subjected to "torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment" during five months in captivity, according to a lawsuit filed [by the ACLU] in a Virginia federal court.

He was flown to Albania in late May 2004 and put on a plane back to Germany, he has said. Al-Masri has said his captors told him he was seized in a case of mistaken identity.

His lawyer, however, has suggested that al-Masri was abducted because of his links to the Islamic association, which provided meetings, prayer rooms and other services for local Muslims.

"In all interrogations, in Macedonia and Afghanistan, Khaled al-Masri was asked only about the Multi-Kultur-Haus in Ulm, about the people he knew there," Manfred Gnjidic told Munich's Abendzeitung newspaper last month.

Al-Masri's case has stoked debate in Germany about how to prevent terrorist attacks while safeguarding civil liberties. Federal Interior Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble, for instance, is calling for tougher laws so that anyone who has trained in camps in Afghanistan can be prosecuted.

Al-Masri claims U.S. agents questioned him about associates including his friend Reda Seyam, an Egypt-born German citizen under investigation by German federal prosecutors on suspicion of supporting al-Qaida.

Security officials confiscated and searched the association's premises in Neu-Ulm Wednesday and froze its bank account. There was no mention of arrests or the results of the search.

More background from Expatica:

In a new twist to the case, Schaeuble reportedly told the interior committee of parliament that the United States had already offered al-Masri both an apology and financial compensation, on the proviso that the 42-year-old remain silent about his ordeal.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel last week said U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had admitted that Washington had blundered in detaining al-Masri.

U.S. officials swiftly denied that Rice had made any such statement.

The punchline of the secret CIA prisons "scandal" is that Europe's failure to keep its own house in order is exactly why the US is forced to engage in such tactics in the first place. Bavaria's move is a good start.