Murat Kurnaz (born 19 March 1982) is a Turkish citizen and legal resident of Germany who was held in extrajudicial detention by the United States at its military base in Kandahar, Afghanistan and in the Guantanamo Bay detention camp at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, Cuba beginning in December 2001. He was tortured in both places. By early 2002, intelligence officials of the United States and Germany had concluded that accusations against Kurnaz were groundless. According to the BBC, Germany refused to accept him at that time, although the US offered to release him. Kurnaz was detained and abused at Guantanamo for nearly five more years. He published a memoir of his experience, Five Years of My Life: An Innocent Man in Guantanamo in German in 2007; translations to other European languages and English followed. In 2008 he testified in US Congressional hearings about treatment of detainees at the camp. He and his family live in Germany. Arrest in Pakistan Murat Kurnaz was born in Bremen, Germany, and grew up there. He was considered a Turkish citizen because his parents were immigrants, but they had lived and worked in Germany for years. He was a legal German resident and married a Turkish woman in Germany. In October 2001 Kurnaz at age 19 traveled from Germany to Pakistan, hoping to study at the Mansura Center (which turned him down); he spent the next two months as a tablighi, a Muslim pilgrim sojourning from mosque to mosque. In December 2001, while Kurnaz was on a bus to the airport to return to Germany, Pakistani police at a checkpoint detained him. After questioning him for a few days, they turned him over to American soldiers. Later, Kurnaz learned that after its invasion of Afghanistan following the 9/11 attacks, the United States had distributed fliers there and in Pakistan promising "enough money to take care of your family, your village, your tribe for the rest of your life" as a bounty for suspected terrorists. Kurnaz says "a great number of men wound up in Guantánamo as a result." One of Kurnaz's interrogators at Guantanamo confirmed that he had been "sold" for a $3,000 bounty. Torture at Kandahar, Afghanistan After finally being released, Kurnaz wrote a memoir of his years at Guantanamo, which was published in German in 2007 and in English the following year. The following sections contain mostly material from his account. He said