‘Poland main CIA prison base’

Both countries deny hosting such facilities, and the United States has declined to comment on the reports.

“Poland was the main base for CIA interrogations in Europe, while Romania played more of a role in the transfer of detained prisoners,” analyst Marc Garlasco was quoted by Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza on Friday as saying in an interview.

Garlasco said the CIA had set up two detention centres in Poland, which were closed shortly after The Washington Post published an article about secret prisons last month. The Polish centres held a quarter of the 100 detainees estimated held in such camps worldwide, he was quoted as saying.

He said the allegations were based on information from CIA sources and other documents obtained by Human Rights Watch. “We have leads, circumstantial evidence to check but it’s too early to reveal them,” Garlasco said.

Contacted about the report, Human Rights Watch referred callers to Garlasco, but later said he was on a plane travelling to the United States.

Polish authorities have repeatedly denied the existence of secret jails on Polish territory, with Prime Minister Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz saying this week he would fully cooperate in human rights probes into the allegations.

Poland is one of Washington’s leading allies in Europe, where it irked EU heavyweights Germany and France by sending troops to join the US-led war with Iraq.

European countries responded to public pressure by seeking answers from Washington before Rice’s trip, but appeared reassured by her defence that the United States respected their sovereignty and acted within the law in its war on terrorism.

In a separate development, the UN human rights ombudsman in Kosovo, Marek Nowicki, denied telling a German newspaper that the US army had run a secret prison at Camp Bondsteel in the UN-administered Serbian province.

Commenting on a report in the Berliner Zeitung, Nowicki’s media adviser said: “In none of (Nowicki’s) visits did he see anything that would have indicated that there were such secret prisons at Bondsteel.”

But he did confirm Nowicki’s view that there was no possibility for any outside body to monitor whether the treatment of prisoners met international human rights standards.