A New Zealander whom authorities here feared had gone missing in Iraq was held incommunicado in United States Army custody for three months of interrogations, the New Zealand Herald says.
Software developer Andreas Schafer, 26, vanished in March, sparking high-level inquiries by New Zealand with US authorities that repeatedly denied knowledge of him.
The Herald says it has contacted Mr Schafer in Amman, Jordan, where he said Iraqi police in Diwaniya, south of Baghdad, had initially detained him in early March and they handed him to the United States.
“I was then held for nearly three months and interrogated by the US Army on several occasions,” he told the Herald in an email.
“Each time they questioned me they said it was the first they had heard I was being detained and that the investigation was starting from the beginning.”
The report added that Mr Schafer was released a week after the British Consul got involved.
Mr Schafer had been working on software in Afghanistan for non-government organisations and had decided to go to Iraq early this year to continue the same work.
The US embassy in New Zealand, which had denied knowledge of Mr Schafer, has not commented on the latest report.
Every time you think the US has plumbed the depths of stupidity and arrogant incompetence in Iraq, you find you’ve misunderestimated them.