Ireland's human rights watchdog has called on the government to ensure that Ireland is not being used for "extraordinary rendition" flights following new evidence which links Shannon airport to the practice.
About 1,500 newly available documents indicate that the CIA secretly flew terrorist suspects or prisoners around the world using a privately owned aircraft between 2001 and 2005. At least 10 of these flights passed through Shannon, the Irish Times reported.
The aircraft, a Gulfstream jet, frequently passed through British and Irish airports including Shannon.
One flight which passed through Shannon, is linked with the CIA's capture of a high level suspect, al-Hashiri, in Dubai in October 2002. He was later taken to a CIA prison in Afghanistan before being flown to Washington.
It is not clear, however, if the suspect was on board the aircraft when it passed through Ireland.
A spokesman for the minister for foreign affairs, Eamon Gilmore, said there was nothing in the documents which proved that rendition suspects had passed through Shannon.
"The government has in the past sought and received assurances from US authorities and we have no reason to doubt those assurances," the spokesman told the Times.
During the period in which these alleged rendition flights took place, the government expressed its "complete opposition" to the practice and insisted there was no evidence that any had taken place through the Republic.
However, according to the report, U.S. diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks last December revealed that back in 2007, then minister for foreign affairs, Dermot Ahern, "seemed quite convinced that at least three flights involving renditions had refueled at Shannon airport before or after conducting renditions elsewhere."
