rape torture

The Prosecutor's Office of the National Court has requested Judge Ismael Moreno to arrest the 13 alleged agents of the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) involved in alleged kidnappings, such as that of the German citizen Jaled el Masri. El Masri, of Lebanese origin, told the National Court in October 2006 that he was kidnapped on January 23, 2004 in the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia and transported on a plane to Afghanistan to be tortured. That plane had stopped at the Palma airport, where the real identity of its crew members - US spies - was hidden. The prosecutor considers that, due to these events, the members of the agency would have committed a crime of falsification of an official document.

INC

(Central Intelligence Agency)

THOROUGHLY

Headquarters: Washington (United States)

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The Public Ministry recalls that in Spain there were no illegal arrests

In its letter, signed by Vicente González Mota, the Prosecutor's Office of the National Court considers the flight on which El Masri was kidnapped and his passage through Spain to be "inditially accredited." The public ministry affirms that "the real identity of the crew members" of that flight "was masked with documentation carried out ad hoc." The British Human Rights defense organization Reprieve produced a report that includes the real identities of the alleged crew members, in reality CIA agents.

They are James Fairing, Jason Franklin, Michael Grady, Lyle Edgar Lumsen III, Eric Matthew Fain, Charles Goldman Bryson, Kirk James Bird, Walter Richard Greensbore, Patricia O'Riley, Jane Payne, James O'Hale, John Richard Deckard and Héctor Lorenzo, according to a report from the Civil Guard. All of them stayed in a luxury hotel in Mallorca the night before the plane they were traveling on, a Boeing 737 with registration N313P, flew to Skopje (Macedonia) to supposedly kidnap El Masri and take him by force to Afghanistan.

In December 2008, Judge Ismael Moreno asked the police for information about the calls made by several of them from another hotel, this one in Ibiza, between February 12 and 16, 2005. All of them had passports whose number began with 900. , which would indicate its diplomatic status. Their homes, according to the police investigation, were close to the CIA headquarters, based in Langley, in the State of Virginia.

The prosecutor recalls in his brief, presented last Monday, that in the Moreno court there is no evidence that the alleged American spies "had any type of authorization from the Spanish authorities to operate in national territory with an assumed identity and in the exercise of official missions", which is why it considers that the display of false documentation by them would constitute "a crime of falsification and use of a false official document in Spain".

The prosecution's brief also demands that Moreno summon the authors of a report by the Human Rights NGO Reprieve that identified the alleged agents "for the purposes of ratifying the report on the identification of the true identity of the crew members." The international arrest warrant against them should be adopted once the members of Reprieve have testified at the National Court.

The public ministry also recalls that in Spain no illegal detentions or torture were carried out by foreign agents on people suspected of participating in terrorist activities. The kidnapping and torture of El Masri are being investigated in Germany, where there is an open process against the agents for these crimes. The authorities of that country have also issued an international arrest warrant against the alleged US spies.

The prosecution also indicates in its brief that there is no evidence that the United States authorities "used their bases [in Spain] for the transfer of detainees within Operation Enduring Freedom," the military device organized by Washington to fight terrorism in Afghanistan. .

What is proven is that the Government of José María Aznar authorized that of former US President George W. Bush to use Spanish airports for these stopovers with full awareness of the illegality of these transfers. "I consider [that] the possibility that some of the transported people have European nationality should be taken into account and the legal consequences weighed," wrote Vice Admiral Manuel Calvo, president of the Spanish Section of the Spanish-North American Permanent Committee when reporting on how it should Spain provided its support to the United States. His premonition came true years later with the German El Masri.