Lithuania investigates possible CIA 'black site'

People in Antaviliai were suspicious of this building, originally windowless, that may have housed a CIA secret prison. (Craig Whitlock/the Washington Post)
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"I have no documents to prove it, and I never worked in any prisons, but I believe they existed here," he said in an interview.

Villagers who live in a crumbling apartment complex about 100 yards from the site recalled how English-speaking construction workers descended on a small, shuttered horse-riding academy there in 2004. They said the workers refused to answer questions about what they were doing but brought shipping containers filled with building materials. The workers also excavated large amounts of soil; with all the digging, residents said they assumed that part of the new facility was underground.

"If you got close, they would tell us, in English, to go away," said a retired man who lives nearby and spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing fears of retribution. "We were really wondering what they were up to. We even wondered if it was a Mafia drug operation or something."

Members of the Lithuanian Parliament's National Security and Defense Committee visited the site recently as part of their investigation into whether the CIA detained terrorism suspects on Lithuanian territory.

The probe was authorized last month by the Parliament after ABC News reported in August that two CIA-chartered flights had brought al-Qaeda prisoners from Afghanistan to Vilnius in 2004 and 2005.

Lithuanian government officials denied the ABC News report at the time and said there was no documentation that the flights ever landed in their country. But the Parliament decided to take another look after Lithuania's newly elected president, Dalia Grybauskaite, said in October that she had "indirect suspicions" that reports of the CIA prison were accurate and urged a more comprehensive investigation.

Arvydas Anusauskas, chairman of the National Security and Defense Committee, declined to comment on its findings. In response to written questions submitted by The Post, he said the committee would interview "all the persons who might have known or could have known the information in question."

"The committee has all rights and tools to ultimately clarify the situation and to either confirm or deny any allegations of the transportation of detainees by the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States and their detention on the territory of the Republic of Lithuania," he said.

Lithuanian officials have also been pressed to investigate by the Council of Europe, an official human rights watchdog, which has conducted its own probe of CIA operations on the continent. Council officials said they had received confidential records confirming that CIA-chartered planes had flown from Afghanistan to Vilnius in 2004 and 2005.

Thomas Hammarberg, the council's commissioner for human rights, said in a telephone interview that flight logs had been doctored to indicate that the planes had touched down in neighboring countries, including Finland and Poland.

Hammarberg visited Vilnius last month and said he personally urged Lithuanian officials to take the issue more seriously. "I told them it is quite likely that further information might leak from the United States, so they should hurry up and do their own investigation now," he said.

Staff writers Joby Warrick and Ellen Nakashima and researcher Julie Tate in Washington contributed to this report.