Otto Schily, Germany's former interior minister, is under pressure following a newspaper report   that the US State Department told him about the wrongful imprisonment of a German citizen by the CIA, a hot topic at the moment as the whole of Europe is clamoring for information about the alleged kidnapping and illegal detention of terrorism suspects by the United States.

The opposition Greens Party has demanded an explanation from Schily, who gained a reputation as a competent, hard-line crime fighter in his seven years as interior minister under former chancellor Gerhard Schröder. Schily stepped down last month after there was a change of government.

The Washington Post reported on Sunday that in May 2004, the US ambassador in Germany at the time, Daniel R. Coats, informed Schily that the CIA had wrongfully imprisoned a German citizen, Khaled Masri, for five months, and would soon release him. Coats also requested that the German government not disclose what it had been told even if Masri went public. The Post said that US officials feared exposure of a covert action program designed to capture terrorism suspects abroad and transfer them among countries, and possible legal challenges to the CIA from Masri and others with similar allegations.

The report was sourced to several people with knowledge of the conversation. It comes amid media allegations that the US used European airports as transit points for flights of terrorism suspects to secret CIA prisons, and possible torture, in eastern Europe. The affair has the makings of a new trans-Atlantic rift and is fanning lingering anti-US sentiment in Europe at a time when Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is visiting the continent to build bridges. She meets new German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Tuesday in Berlin.

Schily's role could unleash a scandal in Germany. The Greens Party, which shared power with Schröder's Social Democratic Party (SPD) until November when a "grand coalition" of the SPD and Merkel's conservatives took office, has started asking questions. "Schily must say ... what he knew about kidnappings by the CIA and who in the German government he told about the information he received," said Volker Beck, parliamentary manager of the Greens. "The Greens will pursue clarification of this case by putting questions to the government."

The deputy parliamentary leader of the conservative Christian Democrats, Wolfgang Bosbach, said Schily had to comment because the Post report contained "the grave accusation that the German interior minister, who is also responsible for the constitution, accepted the kidnapping of a German citizen without saying anything."

Schily has so far refused to comment and the new government, clearly pleased at being out of the firing line, said at the weekend it could not at present comment on the activities of its predecessor. A German prosecutor is investigating claims by Masri, who says he was seized during a trip to Macedonia in late 2003 and then taken to Afghanistan. His attorneys say they intend to file a lawsuit in US courts this week. Lebanese-born Masri, who obtained German citizenship, probably came to the attention of the CIA because his name came up during probes into the backgrounds of the 9/11 suicide pilots.

Masri was held largely because the head of the CIA's Counterterrorist Center's al-Qaida unit "believed he was someone else," one former CIA official told the Washington Post. "She didn't really know. She just had a hunch."

The report poses unpleasant questions about whether Schröder's government was a silent witness to questionable CIA practices in the war on terror. It never made an official comment on Masri's case. Masri's attorney never got any information from it either. The current German foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, was chief of staff in Schröder's government.

Nuclear horror scenario

In case you ever wondered what would have happened if the Cold War had turned hot, the Polish government has provided the answer by releasing secret military intelligence files of the Warsaw Pact, the eastern bloc's military alliance. One 1979 war game entitled "Seven Days to the River Rhine" purports to be a counter-attack in response to a NATO invasion, and leads to the nuclear devastation of Poland, Germany and Belgium.

A map shows Polish and East German troops landing in the north of West Germany followed by a NATO nuclear strike on major Polish cities including Warsaw, Poznan and Wroclaw. In response, the Warsaw Pact launches a nuclear strike on NATO headquarters in Brussels, the German cities of  Bonn, Cologne, Stuttgart and Munich, and the Belgian port of Antwerp. The map was revealed by Polish Defense Minister Radek Sikorski, a staunch anti-communist who went into exile in Britain in the 1980s to oppose Poland's Moscow-backed communist rulers.

Poland's new conservative government plans to hand over 1,700 Warsaw Pact files from a military archive to Poland's National Remembrance Institute to mark what Sikorski called "the symbolic end of the era of post-communism in our country, in which people weren't yet able to learn the full truth about the past." Historians say the files will shed new light on the inner structures of the communist military machine. The 1979 battle plan ends with a ceasefire, an offer of negotiations, and a "peace settlement" that would allow the Soviet Union to swallow all Germany and dominate a nominally independent Franco-British rump of NATO. Russia is not amused at the disclosure. "It's political provocation," said Konstantin Kosachev, Deputy Chairman of the State Duma or lower house of parliament. The disclosure would only serve to give people "the wrong impression that the Soviet Union and Russia were the main source of all the misfortune that has befallen Europe and Poland."

German Houdini eyes ice cube record

Germans celebrating New Year's Eve at Berlin's Brandenburg Gate this year may find themselves briefly distracted by the sight of a shivering man wearing a diaper and staring at them from inside a giant block of ice. The 38-year-old escape artist Vincent Vega, whose real name is Karl Röske, plans to break the world record currently held by American magician David Blaine , who managed to stand for 61 hours, 40 minutes and 15 seconds inside a human-sized ice cube on New York's Times Square.

"I'm bringing the World Record to Berlin," Vega told Bild newspaper. The biggest problem is staying awake and not touching the ice because that would freeze his skin, he said. His wife and two sons will be there on December 28 to bid him farewell when he is locked inside his icy prison, where the temperature will be minus three degrees centigrade. Tubes will provide him with oxygen and liquid food. If all goes well, he will step out as a record breaker just before midnight on December 31. One can only hope there will be enough sober Berliners around to notice.