Ethiopia+urged+to+come+clean+on+secret+prisons,+Weekender

Business Day Weekender, Johannesburg, 2007/04/07 12:00:00 AM
=Ethiopia urged to come clean on secret prisons=


 * ANTHONY MITCHELL, NAIROBI**

ETHIOPIA was facing increased calls on Thursday to release details of detainees from 19 countries held at secret prisons in the country, where US agents have carried out interrogations in the hunt for al-Qaeda in the Horn of Africa.

Canada, Eritrea and Sweden were lobbying for information about their citizens in Ethiopia, where human rights groups say hundreds of prisoners, including women and children, have been transferred secretly and illegally.

Officials from Ethiopia, which has a troubling human rights record, were not immediately available for comment, but have in the past refused to acknowledge the existence of the prisons.

“We know he is in Ethiopia,” Rejean Beaulieu, a Canadian foreign affairs spokesman, said of its citizen, Bashir Makhtal.

“We’ve been making, and continue to make, representations both here in Ottawa and in Ethiopia to get access to him.”

Some detainees were swept up by Ethiopian troops that drove a radical Islamist government out of neighbouring Somalia late last year. Others have been deported from Kenya, where many Somalis have fled the continuing violence in their homeland.

The detainees include at least one US citizen and some are from Canada, Sweden and France, according to a list compiled by a Kenyan Muslim rights group.

They also include citizens from Eritrea, Saudi Arabia, Tanzania, Rwanda, Tunisia and Morocco.

Swedish foreign ministry spokeswoman Nina Ersman said they had managed to gain access to their citizens being detained.

Of those still being detained, two are Swedish citizens and one has a permanent residence permit.

“We have visited them, but not in recent days,” Ersman said, although she did not know the dates of the visit.

Jonathan Hafetz, a lawyer at the Brennan Centre for Justice at the New York University School of Law who has been assisting the family of a detained US citizen, 24-year-old Amir Mohamed Meshal, said on Thursday that he had still not spoken to him.

According to the US state department on Wednesday, a US embassy official had made a third visit to Meshal on Wednesday. In a message passed from the official to his parents, Meshal asked his family to be “patient” and said he missed his mother’s cooking “more and more every day”.

Ethiopia has a long history of human rights abuses.

In recent years, it has also been a key US ally in the fight against al-Qaeda, which has been trying to sink roots among Muslims in the Horn of Africa. Sapa-AP


 * From: http://www.businessday.co.za/Articles/TarkArticle.aspx?ID=2628074**

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