'Signs suggest US illegally held detainees in Europe'

A European investigator said today he has mounting indications that the US illegally held detainees in Europe – then hurriedly shipped out the last ones to north Africa when word leaked out.

Dick Marty, a Swiss senator looking into claims that the CIA operated secret prisons in Europe, did not offer details about the suspected detentions beyond what already was reported by a human rights group, an alleged former detainee and news reports.

A one-month investigation, Marty said, had unearthed “clues” that Poland and Romania were implicated – perhaps unwittingly. Both countries have denied any involvement.

“Based on what I have been able to learn, currently, there are no secret detainees held by the US in Europe,” Marty told reporters in Paris.

“To my knowledge, those detainees were moved about a month ago, maybe a little more,” he said.

“They were moved to north Africa.”

Marty is under mandate from the Council of Europe, Europe’s human rights watchdog, to investigate claims that the CIA shipped prisoners through European airports to secret detention centres – in breach of international and national laws.

He spoke to reporters after briefing the council’s legal committee on his findings so far. The council expected him to present a full report to its parliamentary assembly in late January.

Asked on the sidelines of the meeting which North African country detainees might have been moved to, he said: “I would imagine that it would be Morocco - up to you confirm it.”

Nabil Benabdellah, Morocco’s minister of communications and a government spokesman, said last week: “We have nothing to do with and we have no knowledge about this subject.”

In a written statement to the legal committee, Marty said the information he had gathered so far “reinforced the credibility of the allegations concerning the transfer and temporary detention of individuals, without any judicial involvement, in European countries”.

“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,” he said.

To reporters, Marty said: “We are clearly not in a position to say there is proof, in a judicial sense, to show that secret detention centres existed.”

But he cited two suspected cases of detainees held by US authorities in Europe as signs of a “strategy”, “methodology” and “personnel” used to at least temporarily to hold suspects in Europe.

The cases cited were the alleged February 2003 kidnapping of Egyptian cleric Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr by the CIA in Milan, Italy; and claims by Khaled al-Masri, a Lebanese-born German, that the agency took him to Afghanistan and tortured him after mistakenly identifying him as being linked to al-Qaida.

Al-Masri said he was released in Albania in May 2004.

Marty told reporters that his aim was not to expose any US wrongdoing, but to ensure that the Council of Europe’s 46 member states did not violate its rules.

He said he had written to the council’s members to seek their co-operation in the investigation, but expressed concern that some – citing only his home country, Switzerland, by name – may not want to ruffle feathers in Washington for political or economic reasons.

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

Marty said some governments may not have known of detention centres on their own soil. In his report, he said it was “still too early to assert that there had been any involvement or complicity of member states in illegal actions”.

Of Poland and Romania, identified by New York-based Human Rights Watch as sites of possible CIA secret prisons, Marty said: “We have clues that show that these countries – and perhaps others – were implicated, in so far as people were temporarily held there, not in camps or classic prisons, but temporary stays.”

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 Condleezza Rice, who faced repeated questions about the CIA prison allegations on her recent visit to Europe.

Marty has asked for air traffic logs as he seeks to trace flight patterns for several dozen suspected CIA aircraft, and also asked for satellite images of the Sczytno-Szymany airport in north-eastern Poland and the Mihail Kogalniceanu Air Base in Romania.

Human Rights Watch has cited those as possible sites of clandestine CIA centres.