US: Several European governments have opened investigations into a fleet of CIA-operated aircraft that have criss-crossed the Continent hundreds of times in recent years.
The aim is to determine whether US officials secretly used local airports and military bases to transfer terrorism suspects under conditions that violate local and international treaties.
This week, officials in Spain, Sweden, Norway and in the European Parliament said they had either opened formal inquiries or demanded answers from US officials about CIA flights.
In other countries, criminal probes have deepened into the alleged kidnapping of terrorism suspects by the CIA.
In Italy, prosecutors last week filed a formal extradition request for 22 US citizens alleged to be CIA operatives who are charged with kidnapping a radical Muslim cleric in Milan in 2003 and flying him to his native Egypt, where he said he was tortured.
A German prosecutor said on Wednesday that he had opened a separate criminal investigation involving the same abduction to examine whether the CIA broke German laws by first bringing the cleric to Ramstein air base and forcibly detaining him there before putting him on a CIA-chartered aircraft to Egypt.
Another German prosecutor is conducting a third criminal probe into the disappearance of a German citizen who said he was taken into custody last year while on vacation in Macedonia and secretly imprisoned in Afghanistan by US operatives who accused him of being a terrorist.
The man has said he was released three months later, after his captors realised they had seized the wrong man.
Denmark has also protested the presence of CIA-operated aircraft in its country in response to concerns that the aircraft could have been transferring prisoners, either to the US naval base in Guantanamo Bay, or to secret CIA-run prisons elsewhere in the world.
The Danish foreign ministry has asked the CIA to avoid Danish airspace altogether when transporting secretly-held prisoners or flying for other "purposes that are incompatible with international conventions".
The request came after Danish officials disclosed that an aircraft that had been chartered by the agency stopped for unknown reasons for 23 hours last March at Copenhagen airport.
In Spain, judicial authorities are investigating whether CIA aircraft that made more than a dozen stops on Majorca and the Canary Islands in the past two years were transferring terrorism suspects.
The Spanish government asked the US in March and again this week if CIA aircraft carrying terror suspects made stopovers at Spanish airports, and both times the Americans said they had no record of such flights, the Spanish authorities said yesterday. - ( LA Times-Washington Post service)