Germany will look into a report that a government minister was told about the mistaken U.S. detention of a German man in Afghanistan but kept quiet about it at the request of the U.S. ambassador.

The Washington Post reported at the weekend that Daniel Coats, then U.S. ambassador to Germany, told previous Interior Minister Otto Schily in May 2004 that Khaled el-Masri had been wrongfully held but would soon be released.

"We are looking inside the Interior Ministry itself to find out what information we can get," spokesman Bruno Kahl told a news conference in which officials were bombarded with questions on the issue. "We want to find out what, if anything, was said."

Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who as head of Chancellery under the previous government was one of former Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's top aides, declined to comment.

"I know the demand from the German press and we'll deal with it in the coming week," he told reporters in Vienna.

Opposition politicians have said Steinmeier must have known of the affair and a report in the Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper said Germany's BND intelligence service examined the case in 2004 after Masri's lawyer asked for help from the government.

The investigation confirmed Masri had been abducted but the information was not sent to justice authorities investigating the case as the government wanted the abduction hushed up, the paper said in an advance report from Tuesday's edition.

A German government spokesman declined to comment but referred to earlier comments from chief spokesman Ulrich Wilhelm who said the current government had no knowledge of contacts between U.S. authorities and the previous government.

Schily has been unreachable for comment. Opposition leaders have demanded a thorough investigation of the allegation.

EMBARRASSMENT

The suggestion that a German minister and other members of Schroeder's government may have been involved in a cover-up to protect Washington from embarrassment comes at a sensitive time for the new chancellor, Angela Merkel.

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice arrives in Berlin late on Monday for talks with German and other European leaders where the topic of the CIA's treatment of prisoners is one of the main items to be discussed.

Merkel has been in office for less than two weeks at the head of a power-sharing "grand coalition" with her former rivals. She is trying hard to repair ties with Washington, which never forgave Schroeder for his vocal opposition to the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Masri, a German national who was arrested in Macedonia on December 31, 2003, has said he was handed to U.S. officials and flown to a secret prison in Afghanistan, where he was held in appalling conditions and interrogated as a terrorism suspect.

He has said he was returned to Europe five months later when the CIA realized they had the wrong man. Details of his case began to emerge through the media in January this year, eight months after the reported conversation between Coats and Schily.

On Tuesday, Masri plans to file suit against the CIA -- the same day Rice meets in Berlin with Merkel.

Last month, the Washington Post reported that the CIA used German airports to help fly terrorism suspects across the continent to secret detention centers. This has sparked demands by German politicians for an explanation, although the government has said Washington is not under any time pressure.

(Additional reporting by Mark Heinrich in Vienna)

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