The ministry confirmed, as did the director of Cilipi airport in the southern Adriatic resort of Dubrovnik yesterday, that the alleged CIA civilian plane with an eight-member crew landed at Cilipi on 23 April 2005 and that seven passengers boarded it when it took off two days later.
Niceno said the plane was reported as a private company flight and that no special border control measures were used with the passengers because they were not required to have visas. He assumed the passengers were U.S. citizens and underlined that they were not suspicious at all.
Niceno said the police did not undertake any special measures to control the plane and that no one was registered as either entering or leaving the plane during the time it was on the airport runway, which he added indicated that the plane was empty. "It is telling that all this happened on a weekend and it is evident that those people came to Dubrovnik for the weekend."
Niceno said this was a regular flight which brought eight people to Dubrovnik and left with 15.
Answering a question from the press, he said it was correct that the plane was one of those which AI claimed landed at Dubrovnik.
AI alleged in a report that the plane landed in Croatia twice and was used to transport Khaled al Masri, a German citizen wrongly suspected of terrorism, from Skopje to Afghanistan in January 2004.
The report said Human Rights Watch identified the plane as one used by the CIA to transfer several prisoners to and from Europe, Afghanistan and the Near East in 2003 and 2004, and that the plane landed in Poland and Romania on direct flights from Afghanistan in 2003 and 2004.