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Rights group: US won't cooperate with Polish probe of CIA prisons

Dec 28, 2010, 12:29 GMT

Warsaw - The United States has refused to cooperate with Polish authorities on an investigation into alleged secret CIA prisons in Poland, a human rights group said Tuesday.

The Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights said that the US Department of Justice had in 2009 denied a request by Warsaw prosecutors for such assistance.

Prosecutors have been investigating allegations about the secret prisons since 2008 but have not released their findings, whilst Polish politicians have denied allegations that CIA prisons were located in the country.

The US justice department said that it regarded the case as closed, the foundation added.

The denial was made public only after the foundation requested information on the status of the prosecutors' probe.

The US cited an agreement that says legal assistance can be denied if it could harm national security or national interests.

'Americans in general are not interested in other nations investigating secret CIA prisons,' Adam Bodnar of the foundation told TVN 24. 'They don't want the investigations to end in charges for CIA officers.'

Polish prosecutors had a good case based on material that has already been made public and on other materials they likely have, Bodnar said.

Flight logs obtained from Polish officials in February confirmed that CIA planes landed in Poland during 2003. Human rights groups suspect these were rendition-related 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.

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