The US Central Intelligence Agency has conducted more than 1,000
undeclared flights over European territory since 2001 a clear
violation of an international treaty, European Parliament
investigators said Wednesday.
Lawmakers 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 lawmakers 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 more than 50 hours of 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 lawmaker 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.
He said documents provided by Eurocontrol showed the plane
transferring suspect Khalid al-Masri, a Kuwaiti-born German
national, from Macedonia to Afghanistan in 2004 flew from Algeria
to Palma de Mallorca, Spain, on January 22, from Palma de Mallorca
to Skopje, Macedonia on January 23, and from Skopje to Kabul via
Baghdad overnight the following day.
Al-Masri told the European Parliament committee earlier this
year he was arrested by US intelligence agents on the Macedonian
border while on vacation in December 2003, taken to a hotel in
Skopje and imprisoned there for several weeks before being flown to
Kabul and put in a prison for five months. He said he was flown
back to Europe in May 2004 and released in Albania.
Fava also said that according to his investigations, the groups
of agents on the flights were often the same, and that it was
unlikely that at least some EU governments would not have any
information about the CIA operations investigated by the EU
assembly.
The United States 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.
The parliamentary inquiry started in January, following media
reports that US intelligence officers interrogated al-Qaida
suspects at secret prisons in eastern Europe and transported some
on secret flights that passed through Europe following the
September 11, 2001, attacks in the United States.
Clandestine detention centers, secret flights to or from Europe
to countries where suspects could face torture, or extraordinary
renditions all would breach the continent's human rights
treaties.
(China Daily April 27, 2006)
