Big secret CIA bases 'unlikely'
2005-11-25 21:45
Bucharest - The head of a European investigation into alleged secret CIA prisons in eastern Europe said on Friday it was unlikely large clandestine detention centres have existed in the region.
But, Swiss senator Dick Marty added, prisoners may have been detained for a short period of time.
"I don't think it is possible that we have a Guantanamo Bay type prison but it is possible that there were detainees that stayed 10, 15 or 30 days," he said, without referring to any country.
"We do not have the full picture," Marty added.
Marty said he'd heard rumours about possible secret CIA detention centres back at the beginning of 2002.
Marty was speaking in Bucharest, a country where it is alleged the CIA ran a detention facility for suspected terrorists, for a meeting of the parliamentary assembly of the Council of Europe, the Strasbourg-based body which has taken the lead in the investigation.
The council began investigations after the Washington Post and Human Rights Watch published reports about CIA planes transporting suspected terrorist through European countries and raised the possibility that the CIA had set up secret detention facilities in Eastern Europe.
Several of the flights stopped at the Romanian and Polish sites, Human Rights Watch said, basing its information on flight logs of suspected CIA aircraft from 2001 to 2004.
It said one of the alleged CIA flights that transited the Romanian air base of Mihail Kogalniceanu on September 22 2003, originated in Kabul, Afghanistan.
Other airports that might have been used by CIA aircraft in some capacity include Palma de Mallorca in Spain, Larnaca in Cyprus and Shannon in Ireland, as well as the US air base at Ramstein, Germany, Marty said.
Marty has said he is trying to acquire past satellite images of the Kogalniceanu base and Poland's Szczytno-Szymany airport.
Both airfields, Human Rights Watch has alleged, were likely sites for clandestine CIA prisons.
Marty has asked the Brussels, Belgium-based Eurocontrol air safety organisation to provide details of 31 suspected aircraft that landed in Europe and, according to Human Rights Watch, had direct or indirect links to the CIA.
The Kogalniceanu base was used by American forces in 2001-2003 to transport troops and equipment to Afghanistan and Iraq, and is scheduled to be handed over to the US military early next year.
- AP