'The earlier media reports about flights to the Szymany airport were true. We've confirmed a number of flights that took place at that period to that airport,' prosecutor Robert Majewski at the State Prosecutor's Office told Radio ZET.
According to a 2007 report from the European Commission, not only
CIA planes landed in Poland between 2002-2005, but the Polish government had also agreed for the Americans to hold terrorist suspects at an intelligence training base near Szymany in north-eastern Poland.
No conclusive evidence has yet been presented to back the latter charge. Politicians who were in power in Poland at the time deny it. The prosecutors are only in the possession of a document suggesting that a facility run by the Americans functioned in Poland. It is not clear what happened there.
An official inquiry into the alleged 'CIA prisons' was launched in spring 2008.
''We've determined that most of the 11 flights were by Gulfstream aircraft of the type used by the CIA. No one has ever denied that the planes landed in Poland. But the fact of landing in itself does not mean that there were prisoners aboard, let alone that they were put down and detained somewhere,' says a prosecutor familiar with the case.
Officially, the case is classified and the prosecutor's office won't offer much information. Prosecutor Majewski said only that witness testimonies had been collected. But only from those witnesses who do not need to be freed from the duty to keep an official secret. The others (among them the incumbent president and his predecessor, members of the
SLD and
PiS cabinets, and heads of intelligence agencies), even though they were released from the said duty, haven't yet, according to Gazeta's sources, been asked to testify. Why?
'All information about the pending investigation is confidential,' cuts off Jerzy Mierzewski, prosecutor in charge.
Translated by Marcin Wawrzyńczak
