Spain may have been CIA flight stopover

Spain may have been a stopover for secret CIA flights but there is no evidence that violations of international law were committed on its soil, Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos said yesterday.

He was the first minister to testify before a European Parliament panel investigating allegations that the US Central Intelligence Agency ran secret prisons for terrorism suspects in Europe and flew suspects to states where they could be tortured.

"Our territory may have been used not to commit crimes as such but as a stopover on the way to commit crime in other territories," Mr Moratinos said, adding that 66 suspect flights had made stops in Spain.

"According to all information available to the Spanish government at this moment... there has not been any violation of Spanish law as regards CIA flights since this government came into office (March 2004)," he added.

US President George W. Bush confirmed last week that the CIA had run secret detention centres abroad where terrorism suspects had been interrogated, but he named no country. A report by Dick Marty, an investigator from the human rights watchdog, the Council of Europe, said earlier this year the Spanish airport of Palma de Majorca was one of eight international "staging points" for secret prisoner transfers.

A Spanish judge opened an investigation in June to determine whether suspects on secret CIA flights which touched down in Majorca were held illegally or tortured, court officials said at the time.

Spain's relations with the United States have been frosty since Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero's Socialists ousted Jose Maria Aznar's conservatives in a 2004 upset and kept an election promise to pull Spanish troops out of Iraq.

Mr Moratinos said the American authorities had assured Spain that there had been no secret passengers aboard planes transiting in Spain. The Spanish intelligence service had found no evidence of violation or crime during CIA stopovers, he said.

Nevertheless, Spanish authorities were investigating flights which could have been used to detain or fly prisoners before or after the stopover in Spain, he said. He mentioned a Guantanamo-Misurata (Libya)-Palma de Majorca-Washington flight on September 15, 2004 as being one of these suspicious flights.

Mr Moratinos also cited a Guantanamo-Tenerife-Constanza- Bucharest-Casablanca-Rabat-Washington flight which he said stayed 2 hours 29 minutes in Tenerife on April 12, 2004.

He said a senior diplomat from the US embassy in Madrid had acknowledged in April that it was a CIA flight as part of an "extraordinary handover" but that there were no passengers on board during the stopover in Spain.

Mr Moratinos said he would ask EU foreign ministers meeting today in Brussels to discuss and take a position on the allegation of CIA secret flights.

He said control of flights must be improved to ensure that there are no violations.

"The most important thing is to clarify whether there were violations of international law in countries of the European Union," he said. "The greatest victory you could give the terrorists would be if fundamental freedoms and rights would be sacrificed."