Poland and Italy colluded in the illegal detention of suspected terrorists by American agents, according to a report by the European parliament.
The report concludes that at least 1,245 flights operated by the CIA flew through European airspace or landed at the continent’s airports.
The report expresses “serious concern” over what it claims were 11 stopovers at Polish airports made by aircraft operated by the Central Intelligence Agency.
The report was prepared by a committee examining the CIA’s clandestine programme of moving detainees between third countries known as extraordinary rendition.
The document focuses on activities at Szymany airport in the north of the country, rumoured to be close to a “black site” where detainees were held in secret.
A Boeing 737 known to be used by the CIA for renditions flew from Kabul to Szymany on September 22 2003 and thence to the US detention centre at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, the report claims. No customs controls were carried out.
This was when a number of senior al-Qaeda “high value” detainees were seized during and after the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and were transferred from US bases there.
During 2002 and 2003, six Gulfstream jets that were regarded as synonymous with the rendition programme landed at the Polish airport.
Border guards told airport staff not to approach the aircraft and that landing procedures should be handled only by military personnel, the report alleges, citing unnamed airport employees.
The registration numbers of the vehicles that greeted the aircraft are said to have matched those associated with the nearby intelligence training base at Stare Kiejkuty.
The report also claimed that Nicolò Pollari, director of the Italian security and intelligence services, “concealed the truth” when he denied to the committee that Italian agents had played an “active role” in the abduction of Abu Omar, an Egyptian cleric, in Milan on February 17 2003.
“If the EU’s aspirations to be a ‘human rights community’ have any meaning whatsoever, there must now be a forceful EU response to this strong evidence that the CIA abducted, illegally imprisoned and transported alleged terrorists in Europe,” said Baroness Sarah Ludford, MEP for the British Liberal Democrats and vice-chair of the committee that wrote the report.
