Ukraine Alleged to Have Participated in CIA Rendition Program

By Brent Surgeoner
Impunity Watch Senior Desk Officer, Europe

STRASBOURG, France – Giovanni Fava, investigator for the European Parliament, claims he has new evidence implicating Ukrainian participation in the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program.

According to Fava, the Ukrainian government allowed the CIA to land its planes on Ukrainian airstrips and it also built a secret prison in a Ukrainian military base to which the CIA was granted access.

Ukraine Defense Minister Anatoly Gritsenko dismissed the accusations as “nonsense.”

As evidence of Ukrainian involvement, Fava and his Italian European Parliament colleague Giulietto Chiesa cited a secret document from the Ukrainian government and a Russian documentary. 

The Ukrainian document apparently reveals that the government authorized the CIA to land its plane on Ukrainian soil on five separate occasions in August 2005.  Fava believes that on one of those occasions the CIA plane was carrying Egyptian cleric Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasar (Abu Omar), who was abducted on the streets of Milan and then transferred from US bases in Italy and Germany to Egypt, where he was tortured.

The Russian documentary contains interviews with people who allegedly built a secret prison on a Ukrainian military base.

Based on this information, Fava and Chiesa are asking the Council of Europe to conduct further investigations.  Additionally, they requested the European Parliament’s civil liberties committee to issue a special report.

Last year, Fava published a report that documented over 1,000 occasions since 2001 where CIA planes secretly touched down on European territory.  He claimed that several of these flights contained terror suspects who were being transferred by the CIA.

The term “extraordinary rendition” generally refers to the practice where an individual is abducted in one state and then transported to another state where he is detained and interrogated.  Often these interrogation countries are known to use torture and therefore this practice would violate the UN Convention Against Torture.

For more information, please see:

Yahoo (AP) - Ukraine implicated in CIA renditions – 14 November 2007

Washington Post (Reuters) - EU inquiry into CIA prisons to be reopened – 14 November 2007

EUobserver - EU investigator targets Ukraine in fresh CIA allegations – 14 November 2007