Brussels, (Belgium): The US Central Intelligence Agency has conducted more than 1,000 secret flights over European territory since 2001, some to transfer terror suspects, European Parliament investigators said on Wednesday.
Lawmakers investigating alleged illegal CIA activities in Europe also said incidents when terror suspects secretly were handed over to US agents did not appear to be isolated.
They said the suspects often were transported around Europe on the same planes - by agents whose names repeatedly came up in the investigation - which suggested a pattern of operations.
EU parliamentarians presented a first preliminary report on their investigation, 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, as well as EU officials and rights groups.
"After 9/11, within the framework of the fight against terrorism, the violation of human and fundamental rights was not isolated or an excessive measure confined to a short period of time, but rather a widespread regular practice in which the majority of European countries were involved," said Italian lawmaker Giovanni Claudio Fava, who drafted the report.
Data showed that CIA planes made numerous secret stopovers on European territory, violating an international air treaty that requires airlines to declare the route and stopovers for planes with a police mission, he said.
He cited the alleged 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.
For example, documents provided by Eurocontrol showed Khalid al-Masri, the German, was transferred to Afghanistan in 2004 by a plane that originated in Algeria and flew via Palma de Mallorca, Spain; Skopje, Macedonia, and Baghdad, Iraq before landing in Kabul, Afghanistan.
Al-Masri, who was born in Kuwait, had told the European Parliament committee earlier this year he was arrested by US intelligence agents on the Macedonian border while on vacation, taken to a hotel in Skopje, and then imprisoned there for several weeks before being flown to Kabul and imprisoned for five months.
He said he was flown back to Europe in May 2004 and released in Albania.
Fava also noted that the same agents often showed up on flights, and called it unlikely that certain EU governments, such as Italy, Bosnia and Sweden, knew nothing about CIA operations.
The US has not made any public comment on the 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.
"We have no comment. We will wait for the investigation to finish," said Friso Roscam Abbing, spokesman for EU Justice Commissioner Franco Frattini.
Clandestine detention centers, secret stopovers in Europe en route countries where suspects could face torture, or extraordinary renditions all would breach the continent's human rights treaties.
The parliament inquiry started in January, following media reports that US intelligence officers interrogated al-Qaeda 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 US.
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