Canada, Eritrea, Sweden seek info on US interrogations in Ethiopia
April 5, 2007 (NAIROBI) — Ethiopia was under pressure Thursday to release details of detainees from 19 countries held at secret prisons in the country, where U.S. agents have carried out interrogations in the hunt for al-Qaida in the Horn of Africa.
Canada, Eritrea and Sweden were lobbying for information about their citizens in Ethiopia, where human rights groups say hundreds of prisoners, including women and children, have been transferred secretly and illegally. An investigation by The Associated Press found that CIA and FBI agents have been interrogating the detainees.
Officials from Ethiopia, which has a troubling human rights record, were not immediately available for comment, but in the past have refused to acknowledge the existence of the prisons.
Canadian Foreign Affairs spokesman said of Canadian citizen Bashir Makhtal: “We know that he is in Ethiopia.”
“We’ve been making, and continue to make, representations both here in Ottawa and in Ethiopia to get access to him,” Beaulieu said.
Some detainees were swept up by Ethiopian troops that drove a radical Islamist government out of neighboring Somalia late last year, according to Kenyan officials and police. Others have been deported from Kenya, where many Somalis have fled the continuing violence in their homeland, they said.
The detainees include at least one U.S. citizen and some are from Canada, Sweden and France, according to a list compiled by a Kenyan Muslim rights group and flight manifests obtained by AP. They also include citizens from Eritrea, Saudi Arabia, Tanzania, Rwanda, Tunisia and Morocco.
Eritrea is asking Kenyan authorities for details on three of its citizens, handed over to Somalia on Jan. 20, and who human rights groups say are in Ethiopia.
“At this juncture, the Government of Eritrea again calls on the Kenyan authorities to get the three Eritrean citizens released at the earliest and repatriate them to their country,” according to a statement by Eritrea’s Information Ministry. “Furthermore, it reminds the Kenyan authorities that the responsibility for the lives of the Eritrean citizens rests on them.”
Eritrea and Ethiopia are bitter rivals and have no diplomatic relations.
Kenyan government spokesman Alfred Mutua said the government had no comment to make until it received an official communication from the Eritrean government.
Swedish Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Nina Ersman said they had managed to gain access to its nationals still being detained, including two Swedish citizens and one who holds a permanent residence permit. “We have visited them, but not in recent days,” she told the AP, although she did not know the dates of the visit.
Jonathan Hafetz, a lawyer at the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law who has been assisting the family of a detained U.S. citizen, 24-year-old Amir Mohamed Meshal, said Thursday he had still not spoken to him.
According to the U.S. State Department late Wednesday, a U.S. Embassy official made a third visit to Meshal on Wednesday.
In a message passed from the official to his parents, Amir Meshal asked his family to be “patient,” and said he missed his mother’s cooking “more and more every day.”
Ethiopia has a long history of human rights abuses. In recent years, it has also been a key U.S. ally in the fight against al-Qaida, which has been trying to sink roots among Muslims in the Horn of Africa.
(AP)