BERLIN, July 16 (Xinhua) -- The deportation of Sami A., a 42-year-old Tunisian man, who is believed to have been working for Osama bin Laden, has sparked a political debate in Germany and will be reviewed by a German court on Monday.
Green Party chairman Robert Habeck criticized the deportation, telling the Sueddeutsche Zeitung on Monday that the case was either "embarrassing chaos or it stinks to heaven because the interior authorities wanted to set an example".
The Tunisian in question had lived in Germany since moving there to study in 1997 and there have been numerous attempts by officials to deport him. German investigators believe that he went to train at an al-Qaida camp in a border region between Afghanistan and Pakistan in 1999/2000 and later became a bodyguard for Osama bin Laden, the then leader of the al-Qaida network.
Reporting from Tunis, German newspaper Bild said Sami A.'s lawyer Seif Eddine Makhlouf stated that his client should never have been deported to Tunisia in the first place.
"This is an incredible scandal that has happened in Germany, since none of the accusations have ever been proven," said the lawyer.
On Friday of last week, an administrative court ruled the deportation unlawful, but the German Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BaMF) only received the official fax after the plane transporting Sami A. back to Tunisia had already lifted off.
However, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper reported that the German Federal Ministry of the Interior (BMI), which is part of the migration office, had known about the deportation since Wednesday of last week.
