The European Parliament said Thursday it was investigating
whether alleged Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) flights
transporting prisoners to the military base in Guantanamo, Cuba,
landed at Portugal's airports or passed through its airspace.
The Portuguese government has registered the flights, but never
recorded the fact that the flights were heading for Guantanamo,
said Ana Gomes, a delegate of the parliament's special commission
on the issue.
The information then registered had been altered to hide the
clandestine transfer of prisoners, she added.
A new list handed over by Portugal's air traffic control
authority showed that 94 flights to and from Guantanamo either
passed through Portuguese airspace or made a stop-over on the
country's mid-Atlantic Azores islands between January 2002 and June
2006.
Earlier lists handed over by Luis Amado, then Portugal's defense
minister and now the country's foreign minister, had not mentioned
Guantanamo.
He has denied allegations that the reports he handed over were
incorrect. "Any question of contradiction in the answers given, is
out of the question," he told the commission.
In September, US President George W. Bush acknowledged for the
first time that terror suspects have been held in CIA-run prisons
overseas, but did not specify where.
Portugal is one of several European countries under
investigation by the European Parliament over suspicions that the
CIA had transported detainees through their territory without
proper authorization.
(Xinhua News Agency December 22, 2006)
