FLIGHT records and other evidence points to Poland and Romania as countries that allowed their territory to be used by the CIA to hold top suspected al-Qaeda captives, Human Rights Watch said overnight.
Tom Malinowski, the Washington director of the human rights group, said the evidence, though circumstantial, strongly pointed to Poland and Romania as being among the unidentified eastern European countries referred to in a Washington Post report yesterday on secret CIA-run prisons.
Mr Malinowski said sources in Afghanistan told the New York-based rights organisation that top al-Qaeda suspects, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, were moved out of Afghanistan in September 2003.
The same month, a Boeing 737 leased by the CIA to transport prisoners departed from Kabul and made stops at remote airfields in Poland and Romania before continuing on to Morocco and then to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, he said.
"It's a large aircraft so one could imagine a large group of detainees flying on this plane, as against some other smaller executive jets that they used," he said.
"The fact that it stops in eastern Europe, then Morocco and then Guantanamo suggests different classes of prisoners being deposited in different places," he said. |