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Sweden Accused of Being CIA Secret Flights Accomplice

Stockholm, Dec 21. -Sweden is one of the nations, mostly European countries, which did not comply with applications to reveal their implication in the secret flights run by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), local media reported on Tuesday.
Sweden authorities covered their possible complicity in the so-called "extraordinary rendition" on the questioned antiterrorist program of the United States, when refusing to provide information on such operations to two humanitarian organizations that were carrying out an investigation.

According to the accusations, Stockholm refused to provide data on air traffic that could show the routes taken by CIA airplanes when transferring terrorism suspects.

In that regard, an investigation on the CIA secret flights carried out by human rights groups bolstered the Swedish government's reluctant position on the polemic matter.

The activists identified 54 U.S. planes that were allegedly involved in clandestine flights, and by virtue of the right to information, they presented applications to 28 countries, mostly European, to report on air traffic.

The maneuver aimed at obtaining data on the airplanes' movements was rejected by Sweden, Canada and Portugal, and 13 other countries did not even respond to the request.

In 2001, Sweden was shaken by a scandal of tortures on two Egyptian citizens during a CIA flight departing from the Scandinavian country and bound for Cairo.

Then Swedish Prime Minister Goran Persson later recognized no deportation warrant had been issued in that case.

In that occasion, Persson said he had trusted Egypt's guarantees to protect the prisoners, but he admitted that he had made a mistake.

In the frame of the war against terrorism, other European nations, such as Poland, Lithuania, Macedonia and Romania, were hit by scandals due to their support for the CIA rendition program, after the attacks on the Twin Towers in New York in 2001.(Prensa Latina)