Prosecutors want more time to probe CIA prison in Poland claim

Prosecutor spokesman Piotr Kosmaty, said Friday morning that they had “requested to the Attorney General an extension to the investigation” which has been ongoing since 2008.

He would not say how long the requested extension would be, however.

On 27 January, Mikolaj Pietrzak, lawyer for Saudi Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri who claims he was detained in a CIA jail in Poland, alleged that Polish authorities were dragging out the probe in fear its conclusions would create embarrassment for the country’s authorities.

"The case is obviously, in my opinion, under political control. […] The most convenient thing politically is for the case to drag on," Pietrzak told the Reuters news agency.

In March 2012, the Gazeta Wyborcza and the TVP public broadcaster reported that prosecutor in Warsaw appeals – who, until mid-February last year led the investigation before it was transferred to lawyers in Krakow – were to allege that former head of Poland’s Intelligence Agency Zbigniew Siemiątkowski was guilty of “misuse of powers” in “violation of international law” by knowingly allowing CIA to operate a secret prison in north-east Poland to hold and interrogate suspected international terrorists as part of the US’s ‘war on terror’.

Siemiatkowski resfused to comment on the reports.

In 2005, Human Rights Watch alleged that a web of secret CIA prisons was set up in various European countries by the CIA, including former communist nations such as Poland and Romania.

The prison in Poland is alleged to have been sited in the small town of Stare Kiejkuty in northern Poland and was operational from December 2002 to at least the autumn of 2003.

President of Poland at the time of the allegations, Aleksander Kwasniewski and the then prime minister Leszek Miller, have denied any knowledge of the alleged prison in Poland. (pg)

Source: PAP