Macedonian deputies to debate CIA rendition case

Macedonian deputies to debate CIA rendition case

Esad Rahic, commission president, said deputies were waiting for the new report on the case of Khaled el-Masri by the Council of Europe to be translated.

“We received more than 300 pages from the second report that first need to be translated from English. This is not the only case the commission has to talk about so the procedure may take some time,” Rahic told Balkan Insight.

German citizen Khaled el-Masri accused Macedonia of helping the CIA arrest him. El-Masri contends he was detained by the CIA, drugged, beaten, flown to Afghanistan and held without charge in a grimy prison for four months. The CIA then realized it had the wrong man and took him to Albania, where el-Masri said he was released without an apology.

Macedonian officials deny wrong-doing and in May the commission determined that security agencies did not exceed their authorities in El-Masri’s arrest. 

In its “second report on the secret arrests and illegal transferring of detainees” published this month, the Council of Europe judged the official Macedonian version as “definitely unsustainable” and said that officials were only giving an “orchestrated presentation of the official version.”

Earlier this week the Macedonian Helsinki Committee for Human Rights asked for an immediate parliamentary hearing into the involvement of Macedonian authorities in the CIA's secret arrest.

The Macedonian Helsinki Committee accuses authorities of stubbornly sticking to Skopje's official position on the case despite contrary information received from the German Bundestag, the Munich Prosecutor's office, the European Parliament and the Council of Europe.

The case has become one of the most public examples of the CIA's policy of “extraordinary rendition,” in which terrorism suspects are captured without legal process and secretly taken to countries where intelligence agencies are able to use torture to gain intelligence information. The CIA is barred by U.S. law from engaging in torture.