CIA detainees 'transferred illegally'

The Swiss investigator probing claims that the CIA operated secret prisons in Europe today said people were apparently abducted and transferred illegally between countries.

Senator Dick Marty said in a written report that information gathered to date “reinforced the credibility of the allegations concerning the transfer and temporary detention of individuals, without any judicial involvement, in European countries”.

He is investigating reports that the CIA transferred prisoners through European airports to secret detention centres, in breach of international and national laws.

Presenting the preliminary findings of his probe to a committee of the 46-nation Council of Europe – a human rights watchdog – Marty said he believed that any prisoners held secretly by the US in Europe had been moved to North Africa last month, after the first reports of the secret prisons appeared in The Washington Post.

“Based on what I have been able to learn, currently there are no secret detainees held by the US in Europe,” Marty told a news conference in Paris, adding that he believed prisoners had been taken to Morocco.

Poland and Romania have been identified by the New York-based Human Rights Watch as sites of possible CIA secret prisons, but both countries have repeatedly denied any involvement.

The report to the Council of Europe stated that it is “still too early to assert that there had been any involvement or complicity of member states in illegal actions”.

But it also said: “Legal proceedings in progress in certain countries seemed to indicate that individuals had been abducted and transferred to other countries without respect for any legal standards.”

Marty was critical of the US for not formally confirming or denying the allegations.

He said he “deplores the fact that no information or explanations” were provided by US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who faced repeated questions about the CIA prison allegations on her recent visit to Europe.

Marty has requested air traffic logs as he seeks to trace flight patterns for several dozen suspected CIA aircraft.

He has also asked for satellite images of the Sczytno-Szymany airport in north-eastern Poland and the Mihail Kogalniceanu Air Base in eastern Romania, after they were identified by Human Rights Watch as possible sites of clandestine CIA detention centres.

After hearing Marty’s presentation, Tony Lloyd, a member of the Council of Europe committee, said: “The really difficult thing is the idea is that there is a kind of legal black hole in the middle of Europe.”