EU urges further investigation into alleged CIA illegal flights in Romania

A special committee of the European Parliament urged on Thursday a thorough investigation of alleged illegal flights of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) on Romania's territory.

The committee, which is in charge of investigating the CIA's illegal activities in Europe, said on Thursday it deemed "superficial" the probe by the Romanian authorities into the reported CIA's illegal flights.

At a press conference in Bucharest, the committee's chairman, Carlo Coehlo, said Romanian authorities should continue their investigation to find out the truth.

"All the institutions should make efforts to find out the truth. This means that the investigation activity continues and is studied thoroughly," he said.

"We hail the declarations of Senator Norica Nicolai, chairperson of the special investigation commission with the Romanian Parliament, which did not fully rule out the possibility of illegal flights. We understand that the conclusions of the commission are provisional."

"We brand as superficial the way Romanian authorities took to go through the issues pertaining to the CIA flights in Romania," said the committee's rapporteur Claudio Fava, who gave the press conference together with Coehlo.

Fava said the European parliamentarians did not manage to obtain new evidence to confirm or reject the idea that the Mihail Kogalniceanu air base (in Romania) would have been used for the detention of some officers under the U.S. authority."

Given an informal agreement between the Romanian and U.S. governments on the use of Mihail Kogalniceanu base during the war in Iraq, he stressed, "We can not rule out the fact that the CIA could have organized the switching, transfer or the detention of prisoners in Kogalniceanu airport, without the Romanian authorities noticing it."

Coelho stated they would present a report to the European Parliament containing recommendations that would help the EU member countries and institutions beef up controls and change certain laws "to make sure such events do not repeat."

Source: Xinhua