Bush is making friends in Europe

[MIKE BURN]

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Friday, May 20, 2005 Posted: 1404 GMT (2204 HKT)



BERLIN, Germany (Reuters) -- Pressure is growing on the United States to respond to allegations that its agents were involved in spiriting terrorist suspects out of three European countries and sending them to nations where they may have been tortured.



In Italy, a judge said this week that foreign intelligence officials "kidnapped" an Egyptian suspect in Milan two years ago and took him to a U.S. base from where he was flown home.



In Germany, a Munich prosecutor is preparing a batch of questions to U.S. authorities on the case of a Lebanese-born German who says he was arrested in Macedonia on New Year's Eve 2003 and flown by U.S. agents to a jail in Afghanistan.



And in Sweden, a parliamentary ombudsman has criticized the security services over the expulsion of two Egyptian terrorism suspects who were handed over to U.S. agents and flown home aboard a U.S. government-leased plane in 2001.



Campaign group Human Rights Watch said there was credible evidence the pair had been tortured while being held incommunicado for five weeks after their return. One was later convicted in a "patently unfair" trial.



"We know it's not right to send people back to torture. That's criminal. That's the one factor that ties all these cases together right now," Julia Hall of Human Rights Watch said in a telephone interview.

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Mr. Bush really is making friends in Europe...

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