Canary islands seek explanation of reported CIA use of airports
A dispute over alleged CIA use of Spain as a base for transporting Islamic terror suspects spread today to the Canary Islands, where the regional government said it had asked Madrid to explain reports that airports there were also used for covert missions.
The Spanish archipelago off west Africa thus joins the island of Mallorca in the Mediterranean at the centre of the controversy.
Spanish Interior Minister Jose Antonio Alonso said last night that a judge is investigating reports that at least 10 CIA flights landed in Mallorca as part of the American intelligence agency’s programme of “extraordinary renditions”, in which Islamic terror suspects are taken without court approval to third countries for questioning and possibly subjected to ill-treatment.
The Canary Islands government said today that in May it had asked the central government to explain local newspaper reports that suspected CIA planes had landed five times on the island of Tenerife between March 2004 and May of this year.
“But we never got an answer back, or just a vague answer that the government had no evidence. Now we want to ask again for those explanations,” Miguel Becerra, a spokesman for the Canary Islands government, said.
“The situation needs to be cleared up,” he said. “We need to clarify if Canary Island airports have been used with or without the knowledge of the Spanish authorities.”
