EU proves 1,000 secret CIA Europe flights

THE CIA has conducted more than 1,000 undeclared flights over European territory since 2001, a clear violation of an international treaty, European Parliament investigators said yesterday.

Politicians in Brussels investigating alleged illegal CIA activities in Europe also said incidents when terror suspects were handed over to US agents did not appear to be isolated, and that the suspects often were transported by the same planes and groups of people.

EU politicians presented a first preliminary report on their findings, working off data provided by Eurocontrol, the EU’s air safety agency, and information gathered during three months of hearings and testimony by individuals who said they were kidnapped and tortured by US agents, EU officials and rights groups.

Data showed that CIA planes made numerous stopovers on European territory that were never declared, violating an international air treaty that requires airlines to declare the route and stopovers for planes with a police mission, said Italian politician Giovanni Claudio Fava, who drafted the report.

“The routes for some of these flights seem to be quite suspect ... They are rather strange routes for flights to take. It is hard to imagine... those stopovers were simply for providing fuel,” he said.

He referred to the alleged secret transfer of an Egyptian cleric abducted from a Milan street in 2003, a German who claimed he was transferred from Macedonia to Afghanistan, and the transfer of a Canadian citizen from New York to Syria, among other suspect flights.

The US has not made any public comments on allegations of secret renditions, and the official line by EU governments and senior EU officials is that there has been no irrefutable proof of such renditions.

Fine Gael MEP Simon Coveney called on the Irish Government to request passenger and crew lists.

“The committee has heard that in 2003 a CIA-chartered plane refuelled in Shannon airport en route to the US after carrying out a rendition flight, that of Abu Omar.

"While at the time it would not have been possible to know that it was a CIA flight or a plane on its way home from a rendition mission, we need to learn from what we are uncovering.

"That is why I believe that every privately chartered plane that uses an Irish airport should have to provide a passenger and crew list.

"The Irish Government must also introduce a system of random inspection or spot checks of privately charted planes transiting through Irish airports. I see no reason why the US, or anybody else for that matter, should have difficulty with this.”