Yahoo! News - Mysterious jet tied to torture flights: "The first public mention of the Gulfstream appeared six weeks after Sept. 11, 2001, when a Pakistani newspaper reported that Jamil Qasim Saeed Mohammed, a 27-year-old microbiology student at Karachi University, had been spirited aboard the plane at Karachi's airport by Pakistani security officers in the early hours of Oct. 23, 2001.
There is no information about where Mohammed was taken. But Pakistani officials said later that Mohammed, a Yemeni national, was believed by the U.S. to belong to Al Qaeda and to have information about the October 2000 bombing of the USS Cole (news - web sites).
Since Sept. 11, unnamed U.S. officials have been quoted in several publications discussing the U.S. practice of 'rendition,' which involves sending suspected terrorists or Al Qaeda supporters captured abroad for interrogation to countries where human rights are not traditionally respected.
Well-documented case
One well-documented rendition occurred in December 2001, when two Egyptian nationals, Ahmed Agiza and Muhammed al-Zery, were flown aboard the Gulfstream from Sweden's Bromma airport to Cairo. A Swedish television broadcaster, TV4, reported last year that a check of the plane's registration number, N379P, showed it belonged to Premier Executive.
The Swedish ambassador to Cairo later said Agiza and al-Zery both told him they had been tortured by Egyptian police. Al-Zery was released in October 2003 without charges. Agiza was sentenced to 25 years in prison for his alleged membership in an Egyptian terrorist group.
The Swedish government has called on Egypt to agree to an international investigation into the torture charges.
[The Central Intelligence Agency (news - web sites) has declined to discuss the plane. But one retired CIA (news - web sites) officer said that he understood the Gulfstream had been operated by the Joint Special Operations Command, an interagency unit that organizes counterterrorist operations in conjunction with the CIA and military special forces.]"
- posted by geoff @ #