U.S. agents visit Ethiopian secret jails

By ANTHONY MITCHELL, Associated Press Writer April 3, 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.

U.S. government officials contacted by AP 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.

Western security officials, who insisted on anonymity because the
issue related to security matters, told AP that among 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. One Western diplomat in Nairobi, who agreed to speak to
AP only if not quoted to avoid angering U.S. officials, said he sees
the United States as playing a guiding role in the operation.

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.

One investigator from an international human rights group, who spoke
on condition of anonymity because the person was not authorized to
speak to the media, said Ethiopia had secret jails at three
locations: Addis Ababa, the capital; an Ethiopian air base 37 miles
east of the capital; and the far eastern desert close to the Somali
border.

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.

A further 200 people, also captured in Somalia, were mainly Ethiopian
rebels who backed the Somali Islamist movement, according to one
rights group and a Somali government official, who spoke on condition
of anonymity because he did not want to jeopardize his job. Those
prisoners also were taken to Ethiopia, human rights groups say.

Kenya continues to arrest hundreds of people for illegally crossing
over from Somalia. But it is not clear if deportations continue.

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.

When contacted by AP, Ethiopian officials denied that they held
secret prisoners or that any detainees were questioned by U.S.
officials.

"No such kind of secret prisons exist in Ethiopia," said Bereket
Simon, special adviser to Prime Minister Meles Zenawi. He declined to
comment further.

A former prisoner and the families of current and former captives
tell a different story.

"It was a nightmare from start to finish," Kamilya Mohammedi Tuweni,
a 42-year-old mother of three who has a passport from the United Arab
Emirates, 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, who
spoke on condition of anonymity, said Tuesday that 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.

Tuweni's version of her transfer out of Kenya is corroborated by the
manifest of the African Express Airways flight 5Y AXF. It shows she
was taken to Mogadishu, Somalia, with 31 other people on an
unscheduled flight chartered by the Kenyan government.

The family of a Swedish detainee, 17-year-old Safia Benaouda, said
she was freed from Ethiopia on March 27 and arrived home the
following day. Benaouda had traveled to Somalia with her fiance but
fled to Kenya during the Ethiopian military intervention, her mother
said.

"She is exhausted, her face is yellow and she's lost about 10
kilograms (22 pounds)," her mother, Helena Benaouda, a 47-year-old
Muslim convert who heads the Swedish Muslim Council, wrote on a Web
site she set up to help secure her daughter's release. "She was
beaten with a stick when she demanded to go to the toilet."

The mother spoke briefly by telephone with AP, saying any information
she had was being posted on the Web site. She declined to make her
daughter available for an interview.

According to the Web site, an American specialist visited the
location where Benaouda was being held and took DNA samples and
fingerprints of detainees. It said the teenager was never charged or
allowed access to lawyers. The teen was also concerned about a
7-month-old baby that was in detention with her, the Web site said.

The transfer from Kenya to Somalia, and eventually to Ethiopia, of a
24-year-old U.S. citizen, Amir Mohamed Meshal, raised disquiet among
FBI officers and the State Department. He is the only American known
to be among the detainees in Ethiopia.

U.S. diplomats on Feb. 27 formally protested to Kenyan authorities
about Meshal's transfer and then spent three weeks trying to gain
access to him in Ethiopia, said Tom Casey, deputy spokesman for the
State Department.

He confirmed Meshal was still in Ethiopian custody pending a hearing
on his status.

An FBI memo read to AP by a U.S. official in Washington, who insisted
on anonymity, quoted an agent who interrogated Meshal as saying the
agent was "disgusted" by Meshal's deportation to Somalia by Kenya.
The unidentified agent said he was told by U.S. consular staff that
the deportation was illegal.

"My personal opinion was that he may have been a jihadi a-hole, but
the precedent of 'deporting' U.S. citizens to dangerous situations
when there is no reason to do so was a bad one," the official quoted
the memo as saying.

Like Benaouda, Meshal was arrested fleeing Somalia. A Kenyan police
report of Meshal's arrest obtained by AP says he was carrying an
assault rifle and had crossed into Kenyan with armed Arab men who
were trying to avoid capture.

Meshal's parents insist he is innocent and called on the U.S.
government to win his release.

"My son's only crime is that he's a Muslim, an American Muslim," his
father, Mohamed Meshal, said from the family's two-story home on a
cul-de-sac in Tinton Falls, N.J., where he lives with his wife, Fifi.

"Clearly the U.S. government interrogated him, and threatened him
with torture according to the accounts that we've seen," said
Jonathan Hafetz, a lawyer at the Brennan Center for Justice at the
New York University School of Law who has been assisting the family.

Rep. Rush Holt (news, bio, voting record), D-N.J., wrote to Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice on Monday to demand Meshal's immediate release. "Our
government cannot allow an American citizen to continue to be held by
the Ethiopian government in violation of international law and our
own due process," he said.

The International Committee of the Red Cross, the guardian of the
Geneva Conventions that protect victims of war, is seeking access to
the Ethiopian detainees, said a diplomat from a country whose
citizens are being held. He insisted on speaking anonymously because
he is working for their release.

U.S. officials, who agreed to discuss the detentions only if not
quoted by name because of the information's sensitivity, said
Ethiopia had allowed access to U.S. agencies, including the CIA and
FBI, but the agencies played no role in arrests, transport or
deportation.

One official said it would have been irresponsible to pass up an
opportunity to learn more about terrorist operations.

Kolko, the FBI spokesman, also said the detainees were never in FBI
or U.S. government custody.

"While in custody of the foreign government, the FBI was granted
limited access to interview certain individuals of interest," he told
AP. "We do not support or participate in any system that illegally
detains foreign fighters or terror suspects, including women and
children."

Paul Gimigliano, a CIA spokesman, declined to discuss details of any
such interviews. He said, however: "To fight terror, CIA acts boldly
and lawfully, alone and with partners, just as the American people
expect us to."

One of the U.S. officials said the FBI has had access in Ethiopia to
several dozen individuals — fewer than 100 — as part of its
investigations.

The official said the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings in Kenya and
Tanzania that killed hundreds are a major focus of the agents' work.
Law enforcement officials have long believed the bombings were
carried out by members of
Osama bin Laden's terrorist network who were later given safe haven
in Somalia.

The official said FBI agents would not be witness or party to any
questioning that involved abuse.

It wasn't clear how many people the CIA interviewed or whether the
agency's officers were working jointly with the FBI.

The CIA began an aggressive program in 2002 to interrogate suspected
terrorists at an unknown number of secret locations from Southeast
Asia to Europe. Prisoners were frequently picked up in one country
and transferred to a prison in another, where they were held
incommunicado by a cooperative intelligence service. But
President Bush announced in September that all the detainees had been
moved to military custody at Guantanamo Bay.

One Western diplomat, who refused to be quoted by name for fear of
hurting relations with the countries involved, would not rule out
that additional suspects in Ethiopia could be sent to Guantanamo.

Kenyan government spokesman Alfred Mutua insisted no laws were broken
and said his government was not aware that anyone would be
transferred from Somalia to Ethiopia.

Lawyers and human rights groups argue the covert transfers to
Ethiopia violated international law.

"Each of these governments has played a shameful role in mistreating
people fleeing a war zone," said Georgette Gagnon, deputy Africa
director of Human Rights Watch. "Kenya has secretly expelled people,
the Ethiopians have caused dozens to disappear, and U.S. security
agents have routinely interrogated people held incommunicado."

On the Net:

Benaouda's Web site: http://www.releasemychild.se

Associated Press writers Matthew Lee and Katherine Shrader in
Washington, Karl Ritter in Stockholm, Sweden, and Rebecca Santana in
Tinton Falls, N.J., contributed to this report.