A member of a European Union committee probing CIA rendition flights travelled to Toronto yesterday to hear a former Guantanamo Bay detainee describe the jet that took him to Europe.
Ana Maria Gomes, a European Union MP, met with 24-year-old Abdurahman Khadr as he recalled a trip made in November, 2003 aboard a U.S. Gulfstream IV jet.
Mr. Khadr recalled the words that he claims came from a Central Intelligence Agency handler who put him onto the plane flying out of Cuba and toward Bosnia.
"He said it was the CIA deputy director's plane and they came down to . . . Guantanamo Bay just to pick me up," Mr. Khadr said. The jet stopped to refuel in the Azores islands, 1,500 kilometres off the coast of Portugal, before landing in Europe, he said.
All this was just one more piece in a global jigsaw puzzle for Ms. Gomes, a Socialist politician from Portugal, who combed through a two-inch-thick dossier consisting of notes and flight logs during the interview. Her work with the EU has caused her to be particularly interested in 90 CIA flights believed to have transited through Portugal.
European politicians have become increasingly concerned about suggestions that "ghost planes" are used to move kidnap victims to alleged CIA-run "black-site" prisons. The fear is that EU member states who facilitated these flights are complicit in major human rights abuses.
Investigative journalists, Amnesty International and EU politicians have been digging up flight information to map out covert CIA practises.
"Portugal was part of the circle of rendition," said Ms. Gomes, as she listened to Mr. Khadr's story. "I've been pushing since I heard about your case, to have your name included in the list of victims."
The Khadr family is notorious in Canada, for the family's associations with Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda while they lived in Afghanistan. Abdurahman has often described himself as different, the "black sheep" of an otherwise fundamentalist family.
Mr. Khadr recounted how he was captured in Kabul in the fall of 2001. The CIA, he said, put him to work spying in Afghanistan and then had him masquerade as a prisoner in Guantanamo Bay, before sending him to Bosnia. He ultimately quit spying there and returned to Canada.
Flight logs made available through the EU show that the plane Mr. Khadr described yesterday was likely the same one used in an alleged CIA snatching operation eight months earlier, against an Egyptian cleric known as Abu Omar.
The Italian judge looking into that case has issued arrest warrants for 22 alleged CIA operatives.
Colin Freeze