DESPITE loaded anti-American rhetoric, it has emerged that Zimbabwe may have been used as a transit base for several United States intelligence agency, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), terror suspects in secret and illegal renditions.
In a report, some of it made public on Tuesday by Senator Dianne Feinstein, Zimbabwe, Malawi and South Africa were some of the Southern African countries involved in the CIA’s rendition.
Other African countries are Libya, Mauritania and Somalia, while Morocco hosted a CIA prison.
The report says Zimbabwe under President Robert Mugabe is one of 54 countries exposed in a US Senate Intelligence Committee report as having assisted the former President George W Bush’s administration in a programme that included torture of terrorism suspects.
According to the report, terror suspects, Fahad al-Bahli, a Saudi national, Ibrahim Habaci and Arif Ulusam both from Turkey, Khalifa Abdi Hassan, a Kenyan national and Mahmud Sardar Issa, from Sudan were arrested in Malawi on different occasions in 2003 in a joint operation involving the CIA and Malawi’s National Intelligence Bureau.
They were all suspected of having al-Qaeda links and were initially held in Malawi. They were secretly flown to Harare where they were held for almost a month.
To Senator Dianne Feinstein, the need to make public the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on the torture of terrorism detainees in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks was never in question, despite years of determined resistance by intelligence officials and their allies.
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