Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, suspected of the 2000 al-Qaeda bombing of the USS Cole, was interrogated and had his basic human rights violated in a secret CIA prison in northern Poland, claims a UN report.
The 226-page report on CIA detention centres in Europe is expected to be presented to the UN Human Rights Council in March.
It alleges that the US kept the prisons throughout the world secret - such as the one thought to have been housed in northern Poland between 2003 and 2005 - so as to be able to obtain information from suspects using unlawful methods, such as torture.
The report says: “Secret detention as such may constitute torture or ill-treatment for the direct victims as well as their families,' the investigators said, adding that the victims and their families deserve compensation and those responsible should be prosecuted.”
The report led by the UN Special Rapporteur On Torture Manfred Nowak and the Special Rapporteur on Terrorism and Human Rights Martin Scheinin repeats accusations made by Human Rights Watch and Council of Europe: that there was a secret CIA prison in Stare Kiejkuty, near Szymany military airport in the north of Poland. The report also confirms that between 2003 and 2005 US planes landed at the airbase in Szymany and that a number of people suspected of terrorism might have been detained in a building.
The UN report, however, goes further than previous claims in that it is alleging that he was interrogated in Poland.
According to the report Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, a Saudi currently being held at Guantanamo Bay, was interrogated in Poland. The man was brought to Poland from Thailand in 2002 on board a CIA plane. He arrested in the United Arab Emirates on terrorist charges.
Al-Nashiri is accused masterminding a bomb attack on the US destroyer USS Cole in 2000 in Yemen, as a result of which seventeen Americans were killed. While interrogated, he claimed he was waterborded but there is no evidence that he was also tortured in Poland.
Former president Aleksander Kwasniewski and other top politicians have denied all knowledge of the CIA prison or prisoners being renditioned to Poland.
Similar allegations have also been leveled against 12 nations, among them EU states such as Romanian and Lithuania. On January 21, the Lithuanian foreign minister Vygaudas Usackas resigned after claims facilities near Vilnius were never used to interrogate terror suspects – a claim President Dalia Grybauskaite has questioned. (/pg/mg)