Diego Garcia, a U.S.-controlled base in the middle of the Indian Ocean, has been the focus of theories that missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH 370 has flown there. Amid the speculation, a U.S. embassy official in Malaysia said the rumors are baseless and unfounded.
But amid scrutiny of the island, pressure has mounted on the U.K. over the CIA’s “black site” jail that is allegedly on Diego Garcia.
“We need to know immediately whether ministers misled parliament over CIA torture on British soil,” Cori Crider, the strategic director at Reprieve, which is a a legal action charity organization, told UK Foreign Secretary William Hague in a letter. “If the CIA operated a black site on Diego Garcia, then a string of official statements, from both this and the last government, were totally false,” Crider added, RT reported.
Abdel-Hakim Belhaj, a Libyan rebel military commander and political opponent of ex-leader Moammar Gadhafi, said that he was sent to Diego Garcia in a joint U.S.-U.K. operation, reported The Guardian. He said that he was tortured in his rendition.
“The first time I heard that I had gone through a place called Diego Garcia was when I was told by the head of the Libyan intelligence, Moussa Koussa, during my first interrogation session in a prison outside Tripoli,” Belhaj said, reported The Guardian.
“He was running the interrogation and was angry that it had taken a long time for me to arrive in Libya. I told him that the plane had stopped somewhere on the way from Bangkok. He told me that he knew, and that the plane had landed on an island in the Indian Ocean called Diego Garcia,” he added.
The group Reprieve is representing Belhaj.
“The Foreign Secretary must urgently clarify whether the CIA ran a secret prison on Diego Garcia, and whether our clients Abdel-Hakim Belhaj and his wife Fatima Boudchar were among its victims,” Crider added.
