FBI: Berg Refused Flight Home Before Murder

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http://www.nbc5.com/news/3295422/det...17&dppid=65193

FBI: Berg Refused Flight Home Before Murder

Family Of Pa. Man Disputes Government's Assertion It Never Detained Him

POSTED: 7:39 a.m. EDT May 12, 2004
UPDATED: 6:00 p.m. EDT May 12, 2004

WASHINGTON -- An American civilian who was beheaded in a grisly video posted on an al-Qaida-linked Web site was warned repeatedly to leave Iraq, an FBI official said Wednesday.

The official said Berg turned down a State Department offer to be flown home.

Berg's father, Michael Berg, places some of the blame for his son's gruesome death at the feet of the U.S. government, which, he says, held the 26-year-old in custody during a time he would have returned home to the Philadelphia area.

Michael Berg says his son was held with no access to a lawyer and "no due process," although Nick Berg never complained of being mistreated.

The government disputes Michael Berg's account, saying Nick Berg was held by Iraqi police and merely questioned by the FBI.

Michael Berg says being held by Iraqi police is the same thing as being held by American authorities. He said the Iraqi police do what the FBI tells them to do.

"Who do they think they're kidding?" he said.

Coalition spokesman Dan Senor said as far as he knows, Berg was never "under the jurisdiction or detention of coalition forces." Asked for details about Berg's last weeks in Iraq, Senor said officials are trying to "piece all this together."

A senior FBI official said Berg, a telecommunications business owner who went to Iraq alone to help rebuild by building communications antennas, was detained by Iraqi police at a checkpoint in the northern city of Mosul on March 24 and was released April 6. His body was found Saturday on an overpass in Baghdad.

FBI agents interviewed Berg three times while he was in custody, advising him to leave the country because it was too dangerous for unprotected civilians.

A U.S. consular spokeswoman said that a few days after his release, Berg declined an offer to be flown home, saying he planned to go to Kuwait and call his family in Pennsylvania.

Nick Berg's mother said the family didn't hear from him until April 9. She said they learned from the U.S. government of his beheading long before the news hit international media. But, she said, family members cried when they learned the executioners taped the murder.

Michael Berg and his two other children fell to the ground outside their West Chester, Pa., home after learning a video of Nick Berg's killing was on the Internet.