Location of Romania’s secret CIA prison is revealed claims AP

CIA’s secret prison in Romania was located inside a governmental building in Bucharest where the National Registry Office for Classified Information (ORNISS) is presently headquartered, according to an investigation made by the Associated Press (AP) news agency and ARD, a German television.

“Former intelligence officials both described the location of the prison and identified pictures of the building”, reads the AP article.

The existence of a CIA prison in Romania has been widely reported in the past years but up until now no actual location has been revealed. Romanian authorities have strongly denied the existence of such a facility but journalists and human rights investigators have previously used flight records to tie Romania to CIA’s secret prison program.

Among those believed to have been detained and tortured in Bucharest there were Mohammad and Walid bin Attash, who has been implicated in the bombing of the USS Cole, Ramzi Binalshibh, Abd al-Nashiri and Abu Faraj al-Libi. The latter provided information that later helped CIA to identify Osama bin Laden’s trusted courier and bin Laden himself.

During the first month of their detention, the detainees had to endure sleep deprivation and were doused with water, slapped or forced to stand in painful positions, several former officials told AP. However waterboarding was not performed in Romania, they said.

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After the initial interrogations, the detainees “were treated with care”, receiving regular dental and medical check-ups and having Halal food brought in from Frankfurt.

The Romanian prison was part of a network of so-called black sites operated and controlled by CIA overseas, in Thailand, Lithuania and Poland. However, unlike the CIA’s facility in Lithuania’s countryside or the one hidden in a Polish military facility, the CIA’s prison in Romania was no remote location and was hidden in plain sight in a busy residential neighborhood, “minutes from the center of Romania’s capital city”.

Senior ORNISS official Adrian Camarasan said in an interview in November that the building’s basement is one of the most secure rooms in all of Romania but he said that Americans never ran a prison there.

ORNISS denied today the information made public by AP for Mediafax newswire.

The Romanian CIA prison was opened in the fall of 2003, after the CIA decided to empty the black site in Poland, according to former U.S. officials cited by AP who spoke on condition of anonymity. CIA’s detention and interrogation program ended in 2009 but the prisons were all closed by May 2006.

Simona Bazavan