Midland MP to quiz Birmingham airport chiefs over rendition claims

Nov 9 2009 by Ben Goldby, Sunday Mercury

“In light of this case, I’m going to make direct inquiries and I will take this matter up in Parliament. Rendition flights are a very serious matter and I want to be sure there is no possibility of these flights coming into Birmingham or any other UK airport.”

Ms Burt’s concerns echo those raised by an all-party group of MPs who called for new laws to ban any future UK involvement with ‘extraordinary rendition’ last week.

They say the absence of specific legislation means there is no effective deterrent and prosecutions cannot realistically be brought.

The Gulfstream jet spotted at BIA is owned by a subsidiary of L-3 Communications, an American-based defence firm whose clients include the Department of Homeland Security.

Just three days after its departure from Birmingham, it was spotted at Glasgow Airport, and has also been snapped in Tel Aviv, Stuttgart and Dubai over the past two years.

The European Parliament named the Gulfstream jet in their 2007 report into CIA flights after it was involved in an accident at a Romanian airport having arrived from Bagram airbase in Afghanistan.

The jet, marked with registration number N478GS, crash-landed in mysterious circumstances on December 6, 2004, when a passenger on board was reportedly found carrying a pistol with ammunition.

The report said that seven passengers had disappeared after the Bucharest incident.

And it condemned the CIA’s use of Romania as a location for ‘extraordinary renditions of terror suspects’, including British nationals such as Binyam Mohammed, who was allegedly tortured during almost seven years of detention by US forces.

In February 2006, the National Air Traffic Services confirmed that aircraft with CIA tail numbers had made regular flights through British airspace from the Middle East.

Last year, Foreign Secretary David Miliband admitted that two American ‘extraordinary rendition’ flights had landed on UK territory in 2002.

Mr Miliband revealed that both flights had refuelled on the British island of Diego Garcia.

A spokesmen for Birmingham Airport said the Gulfstream’s flight plans were not available.

A Foreign Office spokesman said: “We unreservedly condemn any practice of extraordinary rendition to torture.”