[JURIST] The US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) [official website] operated a secret prison [AP report] outside the capital of Romania, the Associated Press (AP) [media website] alleged on Thursday. A joint investigation between the AP and a German public television company, ARD Panorama [media website, in German], reportedly uncovered the black site, whose existence has been rumored but never confirmed. The site is claimed to have been part of the CIA’s secret prison [JURIST news archive] network that operated overseas and were used to house and interrogate terrorists. The investigation found that high-profile terrorists including Khalid Sheik Mohammad [JURIST news archive] were kept there until they were transported to the Guantanamo Bay prison facility in Cuba. All of the prisons were shut down in 2006, and the program was shut down in 2009. The Romanian government denied any activity in the building by the American government, while the CIA declined to discuss the detention program. The investigation found that once detainees were placed in the prisons, they endured sleep deprivation and other harsh interrogation techniques, but waterboarding was not allowed in Romania.

This is not the first discovery of CIA-run secret prisons. Investigations have previously uncovered locations in Lithuania and Poland. The Lithuanian National Security Committee concluded that the Lithuanian State Security Department provided the CIA with two secret facilities [JURIST report] in December 2009. In 2007 it was discovered that the CIA had prisons in Romania and Poland [JURIST report], but the governments would never confirm or deny the allegations. In 2010 Poland requested US assistance in their investigation of the alleged prison, but the US government refused to cooperate. The European Parliament [official website] approved a report condemning member states for cooperating with the (CIA) in operating illegal secret prisons and extraordinary rendition flights in Europe in 2007. This action came in the wake of a 2006 report by the Legal Affairs Committee of the Council of Europe [official website] report that alleged that 14 European countries [JURIST report] collaborated with the CIA by taking an active or passive role in secret prisons and rendition flights.