The case circles around the plight of Khaled el-Masri, who on Dec. 31, 2003, was hauled off a bus while in the Macedonian capital of Skopje. Twenty-three days later, the CIA transferred him to Kabul, Afghanistan, where he was held for five months in a secret prison and repeatedly abused.

Masri, in an excruciating testimony before a parliamentary inquiry that probes the German intelligence community's possible wrongdoing in the war on terror, spoke about foot chains, hooded guards and repeated beatings aimed at forcing him to admit that he was a terrorist.

The CIA released him when they found out Masri was not the terrorist suspect they were looking for; he simply had a similar name.

Masri, an unemployed German car salesman with a Lebanese background, was the first well-known victim of the CIA's extraordinary rendition program, the questionable practice of flying terror suspects through European states to detention in third countries, where they allegedly risk being tortured while interrogated.

The case overshadowed the first meeting of U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice with German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin in December of 2005, after which Merkel in a news conference said Masri's kidnapping "was accepted as a mistake by the U.S. government," a statement later called a misunderstanding by U.S. officials.

At the time, Masri had already filed suit in the United States against former CIA head George Tenet, but the complaint was thrown out by a U.S. district court judge last year because of a perceived risk to national security. The American Civil Liberties Union, which is representing Masri in the United States, is appealing that decision.

Yet Masri now has found legal backing in Germany: In what the German media has called a "sensational bang," a prosecutor's office in the southern German city of Munich has now ordered the arrest of 13 CIA agents, on suspicion of abduction and grievous bodily harm.

In a statement Wednesday, the Munich office said it had received in December 2005 from Masri's lawyer a list of names of people on board the plane that took Masri to Afghanistan. The list was drawn up by a Spanish journalist citing a report by the country's civil guard.

With the help of Spanish authorities, an Italian prosecutor's office and European Council Special Investigator Dick Marty, who has probed the CIA's rendition program, the Munich prosecutors were able to draw up a list of "13 clearly identifiable persons."

"According to the information we have, the suspects listed in the arrest warrants are believed to be so-called aliases of CIA agents," the office said. "The investigation will now focus on finding out the actual names of the suspects."

U.S. officials have not commented on the decision, but demonstratively praised the cooperation with German in the fight against terrorrism. The German government has also not commented.

The warrant is already the second backlash against Washington's rendition program, after Italian prosecutors pressed charges against 26 CIA agents and nine Italians including the country's former intelligence chief, for the kidnapping of militant Egyptian cleric Abu Omar in 2003.

While observers say Washington won't extradite the 13 suspects, their CIA career in Europe should be over, if they don't want to risk being arrested.

A TV report by German public broadcaster NDR tracked down three of the suspects in North Carolina, all of them working for Aero Contractors, believed to be the CIA's secret airline taxing terror suspects. They declined to comment.

The warrants come at a bad time for Merkel and U.S. President George W. Bush, who have tried and managed to improve U.S.-German ties after a period of trans-Atlantic silence during the war in Iraq, which Germany vehemently opposed.

Washington has been dealt another blow of criticism in connection with its anti-terror efforts, and the nature of Germany's role in Masri's case, and in the silent allowing of other CIA rendition flights, also remains unsure. Masri has claimed that while imprisoned in Kabul, he was interrogated three times by a German man who called himself 'Sam.'

A German parliamentary committee is reviewing these allegations, but members of Germany's former government of Social Democrats and Greens, which was in power at the time, have testified that they knew nothing about the abduction.