Lithuania, Romania complicit in secret CIA prisons

STRASBOURG, France: The European Court of Human Rights ruled on Thursday that Lithuania and Romania were complicit in a controversial CIA programme to hold suspects caught after the September 11, 2001, terror attacks in secret detention centres on their territories.

Two suspects now being detained at the US military prison in Guantanamo Bay lodged the case with the court in 2011 and 2012, alleging they were illegally held and tortured at CIA "black sites" in Romania and Lithuania from 2004 to 2006.

The court said Romanian authorities knew that Saudi national Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri would risk torture and the death penalty when it allowed the CIA to hold him at an undisclosed facility in their country from April 2004 to November 2005.

Nashiri is accused of orchestrating maritime terror attacks including the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen that left 17 dead. The former Soviet republic of Lithuania was found complicit in hosting a secret prison from February 2005 to March 2006, when CIA operatives held Abu Zubaydah, considered a top Palestinian operative for al-Qaeda.

A 2014 US Senate report found that both Zubaydah and Nashiri -- considered "high-level detainees" -- were subject to "enhanced interrogation techniques" including waterboarding while in detention.

The ECHR found that in both cases the suspects were effectively within the national jurisdictions of Lithuania and Romania, which were therefore "responsible for the violation" of their rights under the European Convention on Human Rights.