El-Masri Case

The kidnapping is believed to be one of the most notorious US "renditions" of a terror suspect, prosecutors said. Authorities are probing el-Masri's allegations that he was taken by US agents in the Macedonian capital Skopje on New Year's Eve, 2003. He says he was flown to a prison in Afghanistan for interrogation, where he was drugged and tortured, before being released five months later in Albania.

According to German Public broadcaster NDR, the CIA agents were believed to have used aliases. But investigators believe they can find out the suspects' real identities.

Meanwhile, according to the Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung, the warrants were "a terrible blow to the US government. Their methods in the fight on terror were treated as criminal acts, and not just from enemy propaganda, but from an independent court of a friendly country. It could hardly be a worse political slap in the face for George Bush."

The paper further recommended Bush should "return to the rule of law ... in the fight against enemies of freedom. If he doesn’t, the Americans will lose the all-important battle for respect and credibility in the poorer parts of the world."

Dresden-based Sächsische Zeitung looked at the practical implications of the issue. "It is all but certain that the USA won't render its secret service agents to German authorities," the wrote. "But any further CIA missions to Germany or Europe would seem very unlikely. The German prosecutors' surprise action has sent a clear political message that they don’t want to have anything more to do with hushing up the whole affair.

The CIA's cloak-and-dagger actions may have been laughable, the Braunschweiger Zeitung writes, but German politicians were plain pathetic. "Their names sound like in a spaghetti western: Kirk James Bird, Jane Payne, Hector Lorenzo. Yet those are just just aliases for the US spies who are said to have kidnapped a German and brought him to Afghanistan.

The background is as tawdry and cheap as the pseudonyms: the agent/actors mistook Khaled el-Masri for a terrorist. Did they apologize? No. Instead, they kept el-Masri for months and then set him free in the woods of Albania. But that is only a part of the scandal. The other is the behavior of German politicians. The facts have long been on the table, but neither the red-green coalition, nor the current government, made a complaint to the US. Luckily, the German justice system was not afraid to be aggressive.

The arrest warrants are an "important symbolic step" that shows that "basically, no one is above the law – even US CIA agents," writes Hanover's Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung. "This is particularly important for el-Masri, because it shows him that he is being taken seriously, and his hopes to punish the criminals won't take a diplomatic back seat to the powerful USA."