CIA’s secret jails in Europe for Qaeda suspects

The report says the jails operated from 2003 to 2005. “Large numbers of people have been abducted from various locations across the world and transferred to countries where they have been persecuted and where it is known that torture is common practice,” it says.

These suspects included Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, suspected master planner for the 9/11 attacks; Ramzi Binalshibh, a member of the Hamburg, Germany, cell that organised the conspiracy; and Abu Zubaida, believed to have been a senior figure in al-Qaeda.

The report says some of the information comes from trusted intelligence agents, who reported directly to former President Alexander Kwasniewski of Poland and to two former Romanian leaders, Ion Iliescu and Traian Basescu.

The governments of Poland and Romania have denied the existence of such prisons, and officials could not be reached for comment on Thursday. Poland has criticised Marty and his investigators in the past for not traveling there to investigate the compound that the report describes as a prison.

Polish president Lech Kaczynski has said that since he came to power in December 2005 “there has been no secret prison—I am 100 percent sure of it.” He added: “I am assured there never were any in the past, either.”

Romania has repeatedly denied the presence of a secret prison there.

But last year, President Bush had acknowledged for the first time that terrorism suspects had been held in CIA-run prisons overseas, without specifying where.

Paul Gimigliano, a CIA spokesman, said on Thursday: “While I’ve yet to see the report, Europe has been the source of grossly inaccurate allegations about the CIA and counter-terrorism.” He added: “People should remember that Europeans have benefited from the agency’s bold, lawful work to disrupt terrorist plots.”

“What was previously just a set of allegations is now proven,” contends the report, an advance copy of which was obtained by the British Channel 4 programme Dispatches and provided to The New York Times.

Apart from the statements of what his report describes as former and serving intelligence agents, Marty quotes aviation records that he suggests provide detailed evidence of clandestine visits by CIA planes to Szymany, in Poland; as well as the text of confidential military agreements signed between the United States and Romania that, he suggests, allowed the establishment of a CIA base in the country.

Marty said the CIA’s partners in establishing the secret prisons were the military intelligence agencies of both countries, which reported only to their presidents and ministers of defence. Neither the countries’ prime ministers nor parliaments’ intelligence committees were consulted or informed.

Prisoners in the secret jails were subjected to sleep deprivation and water-boarding, or simulated drowning, said Marty, who also said that the two jails had been divided into two categories.

The main CIA jail was in a Soviet-era military compound at Stare Kjekuty, in north-eastern Poland, where about a dozen high level terrorism suspects were jailed, the report concludes. Lower level prisoners from Afghanistan and Iraq were imprisoned in a military base near the Black Sea in Romania, the report contends.