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CIA 'closes terror prisons'

THE United States held captured al-Qaeda suspects at secret CIA prisons in Europe until last month when the facilities were shut down after media reports of their existence, US television's ABC News reported today, citing current and former CIA agents.

Eleven al-Qaeda prisoners who were held in Eastern Europe have been transferred and were being relocated "to a CIA site somewhere in north Africa," ABC reported, citing CIA sources.
ABC said the CIA declined comment and an agency spokesman was not available when Reuters tried to contact him.

According to ABC News, eight top al-Qaeda figures and three others were held at one time at a former Soviet airbase in Eastern Europe and some were later moved to a second country.

ABC said Polish sources had identified a base as the site of a secret prison.

US-based Human Rights Watch has said Poland and Romania were the most likely locations for the detention centres, but both countries have denied it.

The United States has neither confirmed nor denied the existence of the secret prisons, as reported by the Washington Post last month.
Before leaving Washington for Europe today, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, defended US treatment of terrorism suspects.

She did not directly address the allegation that the CIA has run secret prisons in Eastern Europe, however, she reaffirmed the United States does not use torture.

ABC News cited intelligence officers as saying that Ms Rice could say that because of a presidential finding that approved six refined methods of interrogation, not defined by the United States as torture.

The report cited its sources as saying that the al-Qaeda suspects being held are regularly subjected to these interrogation techniques, which include sleep deprivation and a practice called "waterboarding" in which the subject feels they are being drowned.

News.com.au, from: Reuters From correspondents in Washington, 06-12-2005