Khaled El-Masri is a German grocery-store owner who was rendered by the CIA in 2003 on the basis of a name collision and tortured nearly to death in Egypt before being released without explanation. Per John Kiriakou, the case is one of two canonical illustrations — alongside Maher Arar’s — of the post-9/11 rendition program rendering the wrong man.[1]
The bus ticket
Per Kiriakou: “One night he gets in a fight with his wife and he’s like, ‘Ah, fuck you.’ He’s so mad he walks out, buys a bus ticket. He’s going to go visit his brother in Montenegro. The name El-Masri, it’s not really a name. It just means ‘the Egyptian.’ Misri is Arabic for Egypt. So his name is Khaled the Egyptian.”[1]
The name collision
As El-Masri’s bus crossed Serbia en route to Montenegro, a sister agency informed the CIA “that there’s this Egyptian guy named Khaled, and he’s going to blow up the American embassy in Tirana, Albania. And we’re like, ‘Wait a minute. There’s another guy named Khaled and he’s Egyptian, and he’s on a bus going in the general direction of Albania. It must be him.’” The CIA asked Serbia to stop the bus, grab him, and turn him over. They did.[2][3]
Cairo
The CIA sent him to Egypt: “they torture him to within an inch of his life. And they’re like, ‘Yeah, this is the wrong guy. This guy’s just named Khaled. He happens to be Egyptian.’”[3]
After release
Per Kiriakou: “When he gets out of the torture chamber in Cairo to return to Germany, he’s got a beard down to his waist and he’s clutching a copy of the Quran. And a German reporter asked him, ‘What are you going to do now?’ And he said, ‘All I want to do is kill Americans.’”[4]