By Louis Charbonneau

BERLIN, March 29 (Reuters) - Germany's foreign minister, one of the country's most popular politicians, defends himself on Thursday against charges he caused an innocent German-born Turk to suffer for years at the U.S. Guantanamo Bay prison camp.

Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier will be testifying for a second time before a parliamentary committee set up to investigate Germany's cooperation with the United States in its "war on terror", which is very unpopular in Germany.

The cases of ex-Guantanamo inmate Murat Kurnaz, a Turk born in Germany, and Khaled el-Masri, a German of Lebanese origin who was kidnapped by the CIA and imprisoned in Afghanistan for five months, have dogged Steinmeier for over a year.

Former Interior Minister Otto Schily will also testify before the committee on Thursday in the Kurnaz case.

Three weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks Kurnaz was arrested in Pakistan and handed over to U.S. authorities, who eventually transferred him to the Guantanamo Bay prison camp on Cuba, where he says he was tortured and abused for 4-1/2 years.

Kurnaz was released without charge in August 2006 and several former high-ranking German officials insist he was a security risk and they could not have acted otherwise. Kurnaz says this is a clear example of character assassination.

"They're trying to destroy me so the German politicians who let me sit in Guantanamo Bay won't lose their power," Kurnaz told German weekly Stern.

The allegations against Steinmeier centre on a meeting he chaired in October 2002 at the German chancellery. At the time he was Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's chief-of-staff and responsible for coordinating intelligence matters.

At the meeting, German media reports allege, Steinmeier and a group of other high-level intelligence officials decided to reject a U.S. offer to release Kurnaz out of fears that would pose a domestic security threat.

Steinmeier, who testified before the committee in December in the Masri case, says he did nothing wrong and has rejected opposition calls for his resignation over the Kurnaz affair.

He is Germany's second most popular politician after Chancellor Angela Merkel, according to a recent poll.

Earlier this month, the former head of Germany's BND foreign intelligence agency August Hanning testified before the parliamentary inquiry that Kurnaz was considered a security risk after the Sept. 11 attacks, which were planned by members of a Hamburg cell of the militant Islamist network al Qaeda.

Both Steinmeier and Hanning have denied that there was ever an official U.S. offer to release Kurnaz, but German media and some opposition lawmakers say there was an unofficial one.

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