Richard Norton-Taylor and Duncan Campbell
David Miliband: apologised to MPs. Photograph: John Stillwell/PA
MPs and human rights groups yesterday demanded an independent inquiry into the use of UK territory by CIA "torture flights" as fresh questions emerged over the government's handling of the issue.
Ministers are coming under growing pressure as officials made it clear they still could not be certain of the extent to which US aircraft made use of British facilities when taking alleged terrorists to prisons where they were likely to be subjected to inhumane treatment.
Last month, David Miliband, the foreign secretary, apologised to MPs, admitting that contrary to "earlier explicit assurances" two flights had landed at Diego Garcia, the British Indian Ocean territory where the US has a large airbase. He said the flights had refuelled there, and each had had a single detainee on board who did not leave the aircraft.
British and US officials have refused to give details about the two detainees other than that one was in Guantánamo Bay and the other had been released. Miliband said he had asked his officials for a list of all flights on which rendition had been alleged.
British officials said yesterday they were "working behind the scenes" in an attempt to get more information from the Americans. The Guardian has learned that Lord Malloch Brown, the Foreign Office minister, has spoken to Manfred Novak, the UN's special investigator on torture, about the alleged use of Diego Garcia as a detention centre to hold US suspects.
Novak said he had credible evidence from sources he could not reveal that detainees were held on the island between 2002 and 2003. British officials say they have no evidence of this. Some representatives of human rights groups who met FCO officials last week suggested records of the CIA flights may have been destroyed.
Flight plan records show that one of the aircraft, registered N379P, flew in September 2002 from Diego Garcia to Morocco. From there it flew to Portugal and then to Kabul. Passenger names have been blacked out. However, Reprieve, which represents prisoners faced with the death penalty and torture, said that in Kabul the aircraft picked up Al-Sharqawi and Hassan bin Attash, two suspects who were tortured in Jordan before being rendered to Afghanistan and flown to Guantánamo Bay. Those rendered through Diego Garcia remain unidentified. In a letter to Miliband, Clive Stafford Smith, Reprieve's legal director, said: "It is certainly not going to rebuild public confidence if we say that two people were illegally taken through British territory but then refuse to reveal the fates of these men."
His call for an independent inquiry was echoed by Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty, and Andrew Tyrie, Tory chairman of the parliamentary group on extraordinary rendition, pressed Miliband to seek more information from the US, including reports that detainees were held on the island or on US ships anchored nearb
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/mar/10/ciarendition.terrorism?INTCMP=ILCNETTXT3487
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