Suspected CIA prisoner rendition plane “disappeared” in Helsinki in March 2006

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As the evening dimmed on Saturday, March 25th, 2006, a Boeing 737 passenger plane with the colours of Miami Air landed at Helsinki-Vantaa Airport. The plane had taken off from Porto in Portugal, and its tail had the registration number N733MA.
      Then the plane disappeared – or at least this is the conclusion that might be drawn from a report published on Friday by the Ministry for Foreign Affairs concerning suspected prisoner rendition flights of the US Central Intelligence Agency believed to have made stops in Helsinki between 2001 and 2006.
      In its prisoner rendition programme, the CIA is believed to have transported suspected terrorists or terrorist sympathisers to secret locations for interrogation in ways that violate human rights.
     
The arrival of N733MA at Helsinki-Vantaa was recorded at 20:37 hours that evening. There is no record of the plane’s leaving anywhere.
      A report of the Lithuanian parliament indicates that the same plane landed in Lithuania that same evening.
      The plane landed at Palanga Airport in Lithuania at 22:25. It is estimated that it could have been in Finland for about half an hour, and reached Palanga an hour and 48 minutes later.
     
Lithuania is an interesting flight destination, as the country has had a secret CIA rendition centre; a former riding centre near the capital Vilnius had been converted into a prison.
      Even more interesting is that the Lithuanian parliamentary report says that no border or customs inspections took place in Palanga. The report says that Lithuanian security officials had instructed border control officials not to inspect the plane.
     
The company that chartered the flight is also interesting. The Miami Air plane was apparently rented by the company Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC). Crofton Black, a researcher at the British human rights organisation Reprieve, says that he has documents that CSC chartered the flight.
      Reprieve has previously published documents according to which the CIA has used CSC as one of its cover organisations on prisoner rendition flights.
     
Finland’s Ministry for Foreign Affairs did not consider the Lithuania flight so suspicious that it would have been worthy of further investigation. The ministry did notice, however, that there were no records of N733MA’s departure.
      “We asked Finavia about that”, says Päivi Kaukoranta, Director General of Legal Services at the Foreign Ministry. “The response was that as the database was so old, and has been moved from one system to another, a line might have disappeared.”
     
However, the Foreign Ministry plans to ask the United States about another flight from 2002 by the same plane, flown on behalf of a foreign power.
      Finland is interested in a stopover made by the plane in Helsinki in December 2002. According to its flight permit application, it had flown from Kirgizia to Keflavik in Iceland, where the United States still had an airbase at the time.
      Finland has previously asked for a report on three flights from the United States, but has accepted the standard response that no details will be given.



Previously in HS International Edition:
  Amnesty International: More evidence of possible CIA rendition flights landing in Finland (11.10.2011)
  Amnesty International: Finland’s involvement in US-led rendition operations remains unclear (30.9.2011)
  Finland disappointed with U.S explanation of suspected CIA flight (9.12.2005)

See also:
  Finnish report on suspected CIA extraordinary rendition flight leaves many open questions (1.11.2011)

Links:
  Extraordinary rendition by the United States (Wikipedia)

Helsingin Sanomat