Poland 'hosted CIA centre'

2008-09-05 17:31

Warsaw - Polish prosecutors have obtained a document showing the country hosted a secret US centre earlier this decade, the Gazeta Wyborcza daily reported on Friday.

The document, seen by sources Gazeta Wyborcza did not name, is a two-page Polish secret service memorandum written in late 2005 or early 2006 following allegations in the US media of secret CIA prisons in ex-communist central European states.

According to Gazeta, the document confirms the existence of a secret CIA centre, but does not explicitly say it served as a prison for al-Qaeda suspects as has been alleged.

Gazeta also reported the document says the secret centre was set up after a 2002 US-Polish agreement on battling terrorism.

Polish prosecutors recently launched an investigation into the long-running allegations of a secret CIA jail for suspected al-Qaeda kingpins near Szymany, northeast Poland.

According to Gazeta, the head of the secret services presented the document in 2006 to two ministers from the then conservative Law and Justice (PiS) government as well as to Poland's chief prosecutor during a meeting.

Gazeta reported that former chief prosecutor Janusz Kaczmarek confirmed he met with the ministers but refused to disclose what occurred. The ex-ministers declined to speak with Gazeta.

Polish authorities have consistently rejected claims in a string of media reports and a subsequent Council of Europe investigation that Warsaw allowed the CIA, the US intelligence agency, to run a secret interrogation centre for captured al-Qaeda suspects in Poland from 2003-2005.

But in a report released in June 2007, Council of Europe investigator Dick Marty claimed the alleged prison was part of a "global spider's web" of detentions and illegal transfers spun out around the world by Washington and its allies after the attacks of September 11 2001 on the United States.

Marty also claimed that Romania had hosted a similar facility, but authorities there have also flatly denied his accusation.

Both Poland and Romania have become staunch US allies since the collapse of their communist regimes in 1989.

In an article published in June, the New York Times cited anonymous CIA officials who said Washington chose Poland to interrogate and torture Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the 2001 terror attacks on New York and Washington.

The secret prison was allegedly located at Szymany, a Polish military air base in the north of the country.

The New York Times claimed Poland had been chosen due to its relatively high insulation from the Islamic world - unlike many west European states, its Muslim community is minuscule - and lowered risk of attack or infiltration by al-Qaeda sympathisers.

Eleven senior members of the al-Qaeda network were purportedly held at Szymany before being transferred to north Africa after the row over the alleged Polish prison broke out.

- AFP