PARIS, France (AFP) – Fourteen European countries colluded in or tolerated the secret transfer of terrorist suspects by the United States, a Council of Europe report has found.

And two of them, Poland and Romania, may have harboured US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) detention centres, according to the report released Wednesday.

“It is now clear – although we are still far from establishing the whole truth – that authorities in several European countries actively participated with the CIA in these unlawful activities. Other countries ignored them knowingly, or did not want to know,” the report said.

In Warsaw, prime minister Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz immediately dismissed the allegations as “libel” with “no basis in fact,” Poland’s PAP news agency reported.

Romania said the accusations were ‘pure speculation’, and provided “no proof that the planes that landed in Romania belong to the CIA, or of any CIA prisons in this country,” Norica Nicolai, president of the parliamentary commission investigating alleged CIA flights to Romania, told AFP.

The report listed Sweden, Bosnia-Hercegovina, Britain, Italy, Macedonia, Germany and Turkey as countries “responsible, at varying degrees … for violations of the rights of specific persons.”

Seven other countries “could be held responsible for collusion – active or passive”: Poland, Romania, Spain, Cyprus, Ireland, Portugal and Greece.

Drawn up by Swiss parliamentarian Dick Marty, the report identified a “spider’s web” of landing points around the world used by the US authorities for the practice of “extraordinary rendition” – the undercover transfer of security suspects to third countries or US-run detention centres.

“The United States … actually created this reprehensible network. But we also believe to have established that it is only through the intentional or grossly negligent collusion of the European partners that this ‘web’ was able to spread also over Europe,” it said.

Marty documented 14 individuals subjected to “extraordinary rendition” with alleged European collusion, including an Egyptian cleric allegedly abducted by a CIA snatch squad in Italy; a German of Lebanese descent seized in Macedonia in a case of mistaken identity; and six Bosnians of Algerian origin who are now at the US detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.