Thursday, November 3 2005 09:33 Hrs (IST) - World Time -

Washington: US intelligence agency CIA has been hiding and interrogating top al Qaeda suspects at a compound in Eastern Europe which was part of a covert prison system set up after the September 11, 2001 strikes.

The secret facility, called the 'Black Sites', are operational in at least eight countries, including Thailand, Afghanistan and 'democracies' in Eastern Europe, a media report said yesterday (Nov 02, 2005).

The hidden global internment network is a central element in the CIA's unconventional war on terrorism, sources said quoting US and foreign officials familiar with the arrangement.

The location of the facilities known as the 'Black Sites' are known to only a handful of administration officials and the intelligence community in the US and usually only to the President and a few intelligence officers in the host country, it said.

Almost nothing is known about who is kept in the facilities, what interrogation methods are used or how decisions are taken about whether they should be detained and the period for which they should be held, it said.

Quoting unnamed sources, the paper describes two tiers of detention facilities--the first reserved for the top 30 or so major terrorism suspects at 'Black Sites' financed by the CIA and managed by agency personnel including in some East European countries.

The second tier has some 70 less important suspects or prisoners who were originally in 'Black Sites' but delivered to intelligence services in Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Afghanistan and other countries.