European court: Romania and Lithuania hosted CIA secret jails

ALISON MUTLER | LIUDAS DAPKAS
INTERNATIONAL.- The European Court of Human Rights ruled Thursday that Romania and Lithuania allowed the detention and abuse of a Saudi and a Palestinian at secret U.S. prisons.

The Strasbourg, France-based court said Thursday that Abd alRahim Al Nashiri, a Saudi national later sent to Guantanamo Bay, was detained and abused in Romania between Sept. 2003 and Oct. 2005, and urged Romania to investigate and punish perpetrators.

The court concluded that AlNashiri was blindfolded, hooded, shackled, kept in solitary confinement, and subjected to loud noise and bright light during his detention at the CIA prison in Romania. Romania denies hosting such CIA facilities.

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There was no immediate reaction from the government. The court said Al Nashiri and Zubaydah were both considered “high-value detainees” taken by the CIA at the start of the U.S.- led “war on terror.”

Al Nashiri’s lawyer, Amrit Singh, called the ruling “a sharp rebuke to Romania’s shameful attempts” to conceal its hosting of a secret CIA prison. She was the lead lawyer on the case with the New York-based Open Society Justice Initiative.

Singh also noted the court’s decision in light of the appointment of new CIA Director Gina Haspel, who supervised a covert detention site in Thailand where terror suspects, including al-Nashiri, were waterboarded, an interrogation technique that simulates drowning.