Guantanamo detainee given access to Polish probe into CIA "torture"

Oct 27, 2010, 17:06 GMT

Warsaw - Prosecutors probing suspected CIA secret prisons in Poland will allow a man allegedly tortured at such a facility to gain access to records of the investigation - a move that his lawyers say is a sign that prosecutors are taking his case seriously.

Adb al-Rahim al-Nashiri, a Saudi national, claims he was tortured at a facility in north-east Poland.

The decision by Polish prosecutors to give him victim status will make it possible for al-Nashiri to file motions for evidence and for him or his lawyers to participate in interviews between prosecutor and witnesses.

'It means the prosecutor is treating our motions very seriously and will undertake actions to verify, which is really at this point what we wanted,' said lawyer Mikolaj Pietrzak.

'If the prosecutors thought the motion was completely ungrounded, he would not include it in the major investigation. But he has kept it in the main case, and he has allowed us to participate as a representative of an injured party,' he added.

Al-Nashiri is a suspect in the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000. He is currently a prisoner at the United States' Guantanamo Bay detention camp.

Lawyers working with the Open Society Justice Initiative, a human rights organization, asked prosecutors in September to investigate al-Nashiri's treatment at an alleged CIA secret prison in Poland.

The lawyers said they have demanded an inquiry and prosecution of those involved in al-Nashiri's 'transfer, detention and torture on Polish soil.' The application calls for Polish public officials and witnesses to be examined.

'It is not important from my point of view whether he is a terrorist or not a terrorist,' Pietrzak told the German Press Agency dpa. 'What is important is that he was kept in Poland and tortured and denied his basic human rights. If we let the perpetrators go unaccountable, nobody else has the right to feel safe in Poland.'

The lawyers claim al-Nashiri was detained and tortured in the secret prison sometime between 2002 and 2006.

Polish authorities have denied allegations that CIA prisons were located on their soil. Prosecutors have been investigating the allegations since 2008, but have not released their findings.

Accountability for the CIA's illegal rendition program must continue in Europe, especially as US courts appear to be closing their doors to victims of this program, representatives of the Open Society Justice Initiative have said.

Flight logs obtained from Polish officials in February confirm that CIA planes landed in Poland during 2003, in what human rights groups suspect were rendition-linked flights.

The logs, which were obtained by human rights organizations, showed that CIA-chartered planes landed in Szymany, north-eastern Poland, at least six times in 2003.

New York-based Human Rights Watch claimed in a 2005 report that secret CIA prisons in Poland were used to house suspected terrorists from Afghanistan.

Read more about Poland Terrorism

Read more about US