CIA terror flight reports dog US-German talks

BERLIN - Damaging revelations about the scale of covert CIA flights allegedly used to transport terrorist suspects throughout Europe will overshadow a visit by Condoleezza Rice to Germany for talks to achieve a rapprochement between Washington and Berlin.

Germany's Der Spiegel magazine disclosed yesterday that German air traffic controllers had handed the Government a list of at least 437 flights suspected of being operated by the CIA in German air space.

The magazine said the CIA had used planes registered as private aircraft and that two alone accounted for 137 and 146 uses of airspace or landings in 2002 and 2003 at airfields in Berlin, Frankfurt and the American military airbase at Ramstein.

Although it provided no proof that the planes were used to transport suspected Islamic militants, the issue was expected to dominate talks between Secretary of State Rice and newly elected Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Merkel has declared that improving the German-American relationship, soured by her predecessor's outright opposition to the Iraq war, is one of the main foreign policy objectives of her grand coalition government of conservatives and Social Democrats.

The covert CIA practice known as "extraordinary rendition" is used to interrogate terrorist suspects outside the US, where they are not subject to American legal protection.

Earlier this year, the US authorities indirectly confirmed that they had kidnapped Lebanese-born German citizen Kahled el-Masri and taken him for interrogation in Afghanistan before eventually freeing him.

More recently the Washington Post reported on the existence of alleged secret CIA interrogation jails in eight countries, with Romania and Poland singled out as the chief suspects in eastern Europe. Both countries have denied the allegations.

German Government officials were yesterday at pains to stress that the flight list gave no indication of what the suspected CIA aircraft were carrying. Wolfgang Bosbach, a senior conservative in Merkel's Government said: "I assume that the German authorities were not informed about these alleged CIA prisoner flights."

- INDEPENDENT