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| 19.11.200908:26 (GMT) | A secret US CIA prison has been reportedly found out in Lithuania, Russian news agency RIA Novosti reports, referring to television channel ABC. According to a former CIA employee and one of the Lithuanian officials, it was located in the village of Antiviliai near to summer residences of Lithuanian officials, 20 kilometers from Vilnius. Earlier an elite school of riding settled down in this building.
A territory in a large forest near Antiviliai until March 2004, was a riding academy and café owned by a local family. Then the family sold the property to Elite, LLC, a now-defunct company registered in Delaware and Panama and Washington, D.C. The CIA constructed the prison over the next several months, apparently flying in prefabricated elements from outside Lithuania. The prison opened in September 2004. According to ABC News, the CIA installed a concrete structure there where it could use harsh tactics to interrogate up to eight suspected Al-Qaeda terrorists at a time. Former CIA officials directly involved or briefed on the highly classified secret prison program tell ABC News that as many as eight suspects were held for more than a year in the Vilnius prison. Flight logs viewed by ABC News confirm that CIA planes made repeated flights into Lithuania during that period.
The President of Lithuania Dalia Grybauskaite said on October 22 that she had "indirect suspicions" that a CIA prison really had existed in Lithuania. She called to carry out careful investigation., The head of the parliamentary National Security and Defence Committee Arvydas Anusauskas acted as an initiator of the decision which will allow committee to question all necessary persons on this case.
The prison was reportedly disbanded late in 2005 after reports in the press on use of secret foreign prisons by the CIA. At the moment of disbandment there were eight persons who had spent more than a year there. The Lithuanian prison was the last "black" site opened in Europe, after the CIA's secret prison in Poland was closed down in late 2003 or early 2004.
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