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Ethiopian terror prisons
U.S. agents interrogate suspects at 3 facilities
in African nation -- AP
By Anthony Mitchell
Associated Press
April 8, 2007
NAIROBI, Kenya -- CIA and FBI agents hunting for
al-Qaida militants in the Horn of Africa have
been interrogating terrorism suspects from 19
countries held at secret prisons in Ethiopia,
which is notorious for torture and abuse,
according to an investigation by The Associated
Press.
Human rights groups, lawyers and several Western
diplomats assert hundreds of prisoners, who
include women and children, have been
transferred secretly and illegally in recent
months from Kenya and Somalia to Ethiopia, where
they are kept without charge or access to
lawyers and families.
The detainees include at least one U.S. citizen
and some are from Canada, Sweden and France,
according to a list compiled by a Kenyan Muslim
rights group and flight manifests obtained by
AP.
Some were swept up by Ethiopian troops that
drove a radical Islamist government out of
neighboring Somalia late last year. Others have
been deported from Kenya, where many Somalis
have fled the continuing violence in their
homeland.
Ethiopia, which denies holding secret prisoners,
is a country with a long history of human rights
abuses. In recent years, it has also been a key
U.S. ally in the fight against al-Qaida, which
has been trying to sink roots among Muslims in
the Horn of Africa.
"No such kind of secret prisons exist in
Ethiopia," said Bereket Simon, special adviser
to Prime Minister Meles Zenawi. He declined to
comment further.
U.S. officials acknowledged questioning
prisoners in Ethiopia. But they said American
agents were following the law and were fully
justified in their actions because they are
investigating past attacks and current threats
of terrorism.
The prisoners were never in American custody,
said an FBI spokesman, Richard Kolko, who denied
the agency would support or be party to illegal
arrests. He said U.S. agents were allowed
limited access by governments in the Horn of
Africa to question prisoners as part of the
FBI's counter-terrorism work.
The AP report brought immediate pressure on
Ethiopia to release details on detainees from 19
countries. Canada, Eritrea and Sweden were among
the countries seeking information about their
citizens.
Western security officials told AP that some of
those held were well-known suspects with strong
links to al-Qaida. But some U.S. allies have
expressed consternation at the transfers to the
prisons.
John Sifton, a Human Rights Watch expert on
counter-terrorism, went further. He said in an
e-mail that the United States has acted as
"ringleader" in what he labeled a
"decentralized, outsourced Guantanamo."
Details of the arrests, transfers and
interrogations slowly emerged as AP and human
rights groups investigated the disappearances,
diplomats tracked their missing citizens and the
first detainees to be released told their
stories.
More than 100 of the detainees were originally
arrested in Kenya in January, after almost all
of them fled Somalia because of the intervention
by Ethiopian troops accompanied by U.S. special
forces advisers, according to Kenyan police
reports and U.S. military officials.
Those people were then deported in clandestine
pre-dawn flights to Somalia, according to the
Kenya Muslim Human Rights Forum and airline
documents. At least 19 were women and 15 were
children.
In Somalia, they were handed over to Ethiopian
intelligence officers and secretly flown to
Ethiopia, where they are now in detention, the
New York-based Human Rights Watch says.
The Pentagon announced last week that one Kenyan
al-Qaida suspect who fled Somalia, Mohamed Abul
Malik, was arrested and flown to the U.S.
detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
One woman's story: Translator says she was
detained
Kamilya Mohammedi Tuweni, a 42-year-old mother
of three who has a passport from the United Arab
Emirates, says she was held in a secret
Ethiopian prison.
Details
"It was a nightmare from start to finish," she
told AP in her first comments after her release
in Addis Ababa on March 24 from what she said
was 2 1/2 months in detention without charge.
She is the only released prisoner who has spoken
publicly. She was freed a month after being
interviewed, fingerprinted and photographed by a
U.S. agent, she said. Tuweni, an Arabic-Swahili
translator, said she was arrested while on a
business trip to Kenya and had never been to
Somalia or had any links to that country.
She said she was arrested Jan. 10. Tuweni said
she was beaten in Kenya, then forced to sleep on
a stone floor while held in Somalia in a single
room with 22 other women and children for 10
days before being flown to Ethiopia on a
military plane.
Finally, she said, she was taken blindfolded
from prison to a private villa in the Ethiopian
capital. There, she said, she was interrogated
with other women by a male U.S. intelligence
agent. He assured her that she would not be
harmed but urged her to cooperate, she said.
In a telephone conversation with AP, Tuweni said
the man identified himself as a U.S. official,
but not from the FBI. A CIA official said the
agency had no contact with Tuweni.
"We cried the whole time because we did not know
what would happen. The whole thing was very
scary," said Tuweni, who flew back to her family
in Dubai a day after her release.
Associated Press
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