Doc. 11302 Report 193. In my report of 2006, I commented that the absence of flight records from Poland was “unusual”,168to say the least. Mr Karol Karski, chairperson of the Polish delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly, suggested that I “did not use the information received from Poland honestly”169and stated, in his subsequent correspondence, that he hoped to “answer [my] request exhaustively” having “addressed one more time the relevant Polish authorities and asked for proper information”. He then repeated a familiar undertaking: “I would like to assure you that I will transmit to you the complete data as soon as I have been provided with it.”170 194. After several further months passed,171Mr Karski ultimately responded with the following three items of information:172 – “the Polish Government has definitively closed the investigation into alleged secret CIA prisons and in this connection, once again explicitly denies all speculations appearing in the media”; – “the European Parliament’s Temporary [TDIP] Committee … has all the information available to the Polish side, concerning the aircraft listed in [your] letter”; and – “the registers of flight movements over the territory of Poland in 2001 to 2005 are in Eurocontrol databases”. 195. This response of the Polish authorities is patently unsatisfactory. The third item of information is belied by the findings I have presented above, along with the accompanying graphic and data in the annex. Meanwhile, the second statement suggests that the Polish Government is attempting to deceive both the Council of Europe and the European Parliament by playing the institutions off against one another.173 196. On the whole, Mr Karski’s response casts the Polish authorities in a negative light, whichever one of two possible conclusions I might choose to draw. Is the Polish Government unable to lay its hands on official data from Polish sources, which our team successfully uncovered and which at least one airport official is publicly known174to possess? Or have the Polish authorities wilfully withheld valuable information from my inquiry? I strongly hope that the Polish authorities now take the situation in hand and retrace fully the unfolding of this situation and establish respective responsibilities. 4.3.1. Transfer of HVDs into CIA detention in Poland 197. Our inquiry regarding Poland included talks with Polish airport employees, civil servants, security guards, border guards and military intelligence officials who hold first-hand knowledge of one or more of the undeclared flights into Szymany. Their testimonies are crucial in establishing what happened in the time after these CIA-associated aircraft landed at Szymany. The following account is a compilation of testimonies from our confidential sources about these events. 168. See Marty report 2006, Council of Europe Doc. 10957, supra note 6, at Section 2.6.2, “The case of Poland”, paragraphs 63-75, pp. 20-21. 169. Contribution of Mr Karol Karski, chairperson of the delegation of Poland to the Parliamentary Assembly, at the 17th Sitting of the plenary of the Parliamentary Assembly during its 2006 Session, Strasbourg, 27 June 2006. 170. Letter to me from Mr Karol Karski, chairperson of the Polish delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly, 28 December 2006. 171. On 14 March 2007, I sent a reminder letter to Mr Karski on this issue, concluding: “I respectfully urge you to reemphasise to the Polish authorities the importance of sending me a swift and comprehensive reply to my letter, along with the requested data.” 172. Letter to me from Mr Karol Karski, chairperson of the Polish delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly, 28 March 2007. 173. When I read that “all the information on the Polish side” had been given to the EP’s TDIP Committee, I recalled the resolution adopted on 12 February 2007 by the very same committee, in which it regrets that “contradictory statements were made about the flight plans for those CIA flights, which were first said not to have been retained, then said probably to have been archived at the airport, and finally claimed to have been sent by the Polish Government to the Council of Europe.” See European Parliament resolution on the alleged use of European countries by the CIA for the transportation and illegal detention of prisoners (A6-0020/2007 – rapporteur: Giovanni Claudio Fava), 12 February 2007, at paragraph 172. It is scarcely credible for the Polish Government to practise such evasion towards me and my fellow parliamentarians. 174. See Tom Hundley, “Remote Polish airstrip holds clues to secret CIA flights”, Chicago Tribune, 6 February 2007. The article says: “Jaroslaw Jurczenko, the airport’s director, denied that flight records had ever been lost for the mysterious landings and provided the Tribune with documentation for seven of the flights in question.” 41