Fourteen European states including Britain colluded in a "global spider's web" of secret CIA flights ferrying terror suspects around the world, according to a report published today by Europe's top human rights body.
Dick Marty, the Swiss senator who led the seven-month investigation for the Council of Europe said that he had no concrete proof of CIA detention centres in Europe but thought both Poland and Romania had hosted such centres.
Unveiling the report in Paris today, he said: "Even if proof, in the classical meaning of the term, is not as yet available, a number of coherent and converging elements indicate that such secret detention centres did indeed exist in Europe."
Both Poland and Romania rejected the charge. "These accusations are slanderous," said Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz, the Polish Prime Minister. "They are not based on any facts and that is all I know and all I have to say."
The investigation relied largely on flight logs provided by the European Union’s air traffic agency, Eurocontrol, and evidence gathered from people who said they had been abducted by US intelligence agents during the War on Terror.
"Our analysis of the CIA 'rendition' programme has revealed a network that resembles a spider's web spun across the globe," Mr Marty wrote in the report.
"The analysis is based on official information provided by national and international air traffic control authorities, as was as on other information including from sources inside intelligence services, including the American."
But he added: "The impression which some governments tried to create at the beginning of this debate - that Europe was a victim of secret CIA plots - does not seem to correspond to reality.
"It is now clear - although we are still far from establishing the whole truth - that authorities in several European countries actively participated with the CIA in these unlawful activities. Other countries ignored them knowingly, or did not want to know."
Mr Marty said that a total of 14 of the 46 Council of Europe member states were implicated in the practice of extraordinary rendition, seven of which - including Britain - could be held responsible for "violations of the rights of specific persons".
Britain was also named alongside Poland, Romania, Germany, Turkey, Spain, Cyprus, Ireland, Portugal, Greece and Italy in a list of countries accused of collusion - "active or passive" - with the CIA rendition programme.
But Tony Blair dismissed the report in the Commons today, telling MPs that it added "absolutely nothing new whatever" to what was known about the rendition programme. He added: "We have kept Parliament informed of all the (rendition) requests we are aware of - four in 1998, two of which were granted, two declined."
Mr Marty's investigation runs parallel to one by the European Parliament, which has said that data from Eurocontrol shows there have been more than 1,000 clandestine CIA flights stopping on European territory since the September 11 attacks in the United States.
In a key section of the report, Mr Marty quotes Michael Scheuer, a senior CIA counter-terrorist official who headed the agency's Bin Laden Unit, as telling a member of the investigating team that there were "lots of reasons other than moving prisoners to have aircrafts" - such as delivering weapons, or food or other supplies such as toiletries, magazines or Starbucks coffee.
Mr Scheuer said: "So out of 1,000 flights, I would bet that 98 per cent of those flights are about logistics."
In his report, Mr Marty adds: "In fact it is precisely the remaining 2 per cent that interest us."
The Council of Europe investigator said that he treated each flight not individually but as a circuit that usually began and ended at Dulles Airport in Washington. Of the 17 individual cases of rendition examined, at least two happened on the same circuit by the same plane and rendition team.
Mr Marty takes the example of one aircraft, a Boeing 737 jet, tail number N313P, which landed in the Romanian city of Timisoara at 11.51pm on January 25, 2004 and left just 72 minutes later.
He said that Romania appeared to be the "only Council of Europe member state to be located on one of the rendition circuits and which bears all the characteristics of a detainee transfer or drop-off point".
That same aircraft, at other points on its tour, also made brief night-time stops in Rabat, Morocco, and Skopje, Macedonia. "In both of these cases were possess sufficient indications to claim that when the plane left its destination it was carrying a prisoner to a secret detention centre situated in Kabul," the report said.
In between the rendition flights, the aircraft visited Palma de Mallorca, in Spain, which was "a well established staging point also used for recuperation purposes in the middle of rendition circuits" and where crew would reportedly check in to a local hotel using aliases taken from Hollywood movies such as Alien and Blade Runner.
The flight from Macedona to Kabul, via Baghdad, allegedly carried Khaled el-Masri, a German citizen of Lebanese descent who claims to have been held for nearly five months, first in Macedonia, the former Yugoslav republic, and then in Kabul before being dumped in Albania.
The Council of Europe investigators interviewed Mr el-Masri at length and said that his account, which includes numerous allegations of torture and mistreatment both in Macedonia and Kabul, was "borne out by numerous items of evidence", some of them still secret.
Other terror suspects snatched include an Egyptian cleric allegedly abducted by a CIA squad in Italy and six Bosnians of Algerian origin who were handed to the US authorities and are now at the US detention camp at Guantanamo Bay.
Britain was accused of handing the CIA information about its citizens or residents, who then allegedly faced"rendition" and torture under interrogation.
But the strongest claims were made against Poland and Romania, where the report said there is"now a preponderance of indications" that secret detention centres were operated near aircraft landing points.
Mr Marty said that while the suspects' treatment "does not appear to reach the threshold for torture, it may well be considered as inhuman or degrading".
Washington has acknowledged the secret transfer of some terrorist suspects between countries but says that it always acted with the full knowledge of the countries concerned and denies any wrongdoing. It also says that its agents, even abroad, have to comply with international humanitarian law prohibiting torture.
