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The interrogator has heard similar tall tales from asylum-seekers before, but this one is especially bizarre. The official notes that the man's statements were "unsubstantiated, contradictory and unbelievable," adding that Abdul Rahman Jawed made an especially "confused impression."

This is the same man the world now knows as Abdul Rahman.

For two weeks, Rahman has been at the center of world politics. The possibility that Rahman could be put to death for apostasy made Western nations realize that despite the massive amounts of reconstruction aid they have pumped into Afghanistan, human rights remain by no means guaranteed in the country.
And in Afghanistan, Islamists accused President Hamid Karzai's government of caving in to pressure from the West by allowing Rahman to be released and taken to Italy. All of this is now known, as are the geopolitical aspects of the Rahman case.

The German Rahman file, together with statements made by his brother, who has lived near Stuttgart since 1993, and a patient file from a clinic in Pakistan, tell a different story: that of the odyssey of a severely emotionally disturbed man who has been wandering aimlessly through the world for years, a man without a goal or a foothold. The file casts significant doubt on widely propagated theories that Rahman is a man driven by his faith and willingness to become a martyr. Instead, the file depicts a man driven by his psychoses and paranoia.

This new information is also likely to dispel suspicions that an Afghan court's assertion that he lacked the mental capacity to stand trial was merely a pretext, in response to pressure from the West, to save Rahman from execution. In fact, there is growing evidence that Rahman is not always in full command of his faculties.

According to his foreign nationals file, Rahman was born on June 15, 1964 in Parvan Province, about 40 kilometers north of Kabul.
Baqi Samandar, a journalist living in Hamburg, says he has a source claiming to be an old friend of Rahman who says that Rahman suffered a horrible youth "with many dead." According to the source, the Soviets and their allies bombed Rahman's village at least eight times, leaving the local river swollen with corpses and fish feeding on the human remains. Rahman's family, said the source, fled to Pakistan, where it was barely able to make ends meet. That was when Abdul Rahman apparently joined a Christian organization and was baptized.

How much of this is true is difficult to say because Samandar's account ends in a series of episodes that are highly questionable at best. According to the story, Rahman spent an extended period of time in the 1990s living in Hamburg, where he regularly attended Afghan Christian churches. Newspapers reported that Rahman spent nine years in Germany.

The first record of Rahman entering Germany came on February 19, 2000. There is also evidence to suggest that this was first and last time he entered Germany, staying here for just under seven months. According to the official record on Rahman, he was registered as a foreign national with authorities in the Bavarian city of Passau. Rahman filed his application for asylum on Feb. 25, and it was denied in April. According to an entry in the registration records dated September 1, Rahman had "moved abroad." That's when Rahman moved to Belgium, where he also filed an application for asylum, but under a different name.

This part of his story is derived from both the files and information provided by his brother, who has since been questioned by the German Foreign Ministry. The brother, who has been staying with his family in Kabul for the past few weeks, told SPIEGEL that he was unaware of Rahman having previously spent time in Germany. The brother claims that Rahman contacted him shortly before arriving in Germany in 2000, claiming that he needed help getting into Germany illegally.

Rahman's brother, who lives in southern Germany, claims he paid for three attempts to smuggle Abdul into the country -- at a cost of $10,000 for each attempt -- a debt he is still paying off today. One attempt apparently failed in Budapest, where Rahman was arrested. According to the brother's story, Rahman finally made it into Germany through the Austrian border. He was stopped by police in Munich, at which point he filed an application for asylum and was placed in a residential facility in Passau.

At the time, his brother was relieved not to have to pay for yet another of Rahman's attempts to enter the country. But he was far from pleased. The family had spent too much time enduring Abdul Rahman's stormy temper and the illness that made him so unpredictable.

"Abdul Rahman had been crazy for years," says the brother, adding that his brother's mental problems date back to the early 1990s, when the family was living in Kabul. "He suffered from delusions that someone was pursuing him and wanted to kill him. He trusted no one -- family members and strangers alike."

Rahman allegedly beat his brother, his father, his wife and their two children, daughters Maria and Mariam. "There was no normal life with him," says the brother, "you always had to be vigilant that he might fly off the handle."

The medications apparently weren't working. Rahman obtained a divorce in 1995 after his wife decided that she had had enough. Jawid's father came to Pakistan to retrieve his daughter-in-law and his grandchildren.

Because of his history, even Rahman's brother refused to believe the stories Abdul tried to pan off on German authorities in 2000, especially the claims that someone had tried to kill him in Afghanistan.
When his German petition was denied, Rahman went to Belgium, where he was tolerated as a refugee. But he took his illness with him wherever he went. According to his brother, things went "up and down" for Rahman in Belgium, where he alternated between normal behavior and fits of rage. When the Belgians began the process of deporting Afghans, Rahman voluntarily returned to his family in Kabul.

The family apparently made his life a living hell. According to the police report filed by his father, which led to his trial: "He is a brutal man. He hits me and the children and he damages my family's morale." In contrast, Rahman's conversion to Christianity is only mentioned once. According to the daughter, Mariam: "he converted from Islam to Christianity." But the conversion was apparently not the family's only problem. "He hit us and didn't bring us any clothing or food -- he is our father in name only," she says. 

Both Western nations and his family are probably relieved that Rahman is no longer in Afghanistan. Italian intelligence flew him to Rome last Tuesday. Rahman's removal from the country was the result of hours of negotiations between the Afghan judiciary and the United Nations, which had presented a dossier contending that Rahman was not entirely sane, a contention that was supported by his medical file from Pakistan. The Italians promptly awarded Rahman asylum, and they now plan to give him a new identity.

In his first statement after arriving in Rome, Rahman said: "I know that I have lost my family, but that is the price I pay for my faith." However, instead of spending his first night praying in a country that guarantees freedom of religion, Rahman ate pizza and ordered one espresso after the next. Then he went to shave.

JURGEN DAHLKAMP, MATTHIAS GEBAUER, MATHIEU VON ROHR, ALEXANDER SMOLTCZYK, HOLGER STARK

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan.