European states allowed secret CIA flights: report

European governments helped the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency operate illegal detention centres and clandestine flights for "terrorist suspects," according to a report released Tuesday.

The Council of Europe investigation could not confirm the existence of secret prisons that reportedly held the suspects in Romania and Poland.

However, it did find evidence suggesting that suspects were taken to landing points in those countries, said Swiss Senator Dick Marty.

"Even if proof, in the classical meaning of the term, is not as yet available, a number of coherent and converging elements indicate that such secret detention centres did indeed exist in Europe," Marty said in Paris.

"It is now clear that authorities in several European countries actively participated with the CIA in these unlawful activities. Other countries ignored them knowingly, or did not want to know."

Marty said Sweden, Bosnia and Herzegovina, the United Kingdom, Italy, Macedonia, Germany and Turkey could be held responsible, in varying degrees, for violations of the rights of specific individuals.

"It is clear that an unspecified number of persons, deemed to be members or accomplices of terrorist movements, were arbitrarily and unlawfully arrested and/or detained and transported under the supervision of services acting in the name, or on behalf, of the American authorities," he wrote in the report.

Several other countries colluded, actively or passively, in the detention or transfer of unknown persons, Marty said.

Government officials from Poland and Romania denied the allegations, with British Prime Minister Tony Blair claiming there was nothing new in the report.

Secret flights that took suspects to prisons wherethey could face torture would violate European human rights conventions.

The inquiry of the Council of Europe was launched last November following media reports that the CIA had transported terror suspects on secret flights to air bases in Poland and Romania.

The full report is due to be debated by the council's assembly on June 27.

The European Parliament is also investigating flight data of more than 1,000 clandestine CIA flights that stopped at European destinations since the attacks in the United States on Sept. 11, 2001.