Investigator: US 'outsourced' torture
(AP)
Updated: 2006-01-24 19:48

Human Rights Watch identified Romania and Poland as possible sites of secret U.S.-run detention facilities. Both countries have denied involvement, and Marty's report said there was no formal, irrefutable evidence of secret CIA prisons in either country, or anywhere else in Europe.

Clandestine detention centers would violate European human rights treaties.

"On the other hand, it has been proved that individuals have been abducted, deprived of their liberty and all rights and transported to different destinations in Europe to be handed over to countries in which they have suffered degrading treatment and torture," the report said.

In the report, Marty analyzed the cases of an Egyptian cleric allegedly kidnapped in Italy and sent back to Egypt and a German captured in Macedonia and taken to Afghanistan.

Last week, Italy's justice minister formally asked the United States to allow Italian prosecutors to question 22 purported CIA operatives they accuse of kidnapping the Egyptian cleric, Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr, in 2003 from a Milan street.

Prosecutors say Nasr, believed to belong to an Islamic terror group, was taken by the CIA to a joint U.S.-Italian air base, flown to Germany and then to Egypt, where he claims he was tortured.

Khaled al-Masri, a German citizen of Lebanese descent, is suing the CIA for wrongful imprisonment and torture, saying he was seized in Macedonia on Dec. 31, 2003, and taken by CIA agents to Afghanistan, where he was allegedly abused before being released in Albania in May 2004.

Citing an American lawyer, Marty also said six Bosnians were abducted by American agents on Bosnian soil and taken to the U.S. detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, despite a Bosnian judgment ordering their release.