Warsaw -- The US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has maintained a secret facility in Poland since 2002, where it may have held terrorist suspects, according to a report by a Polish newspaper on Saturday.

The report, published in the Dziennik newspaper, said the facility, which had been set up at the invitation of the Polish security services, was located within the grounds of a Polish intelligence agent training center in the town of Kiejkuty in the north of the country.

An unnamed security services officer told the newspaper that US staff had exclusive access to the CIA zone within the Polish base and that supplies for personnel and detainees were delivered directly from Frankfurt am Main, in Germany.

US officers had a "free hand," and Polish authorities had no control of activity at the facility, said the source. Another unnamed Polish officer told the paper that vehicles with darkened windows were frequently seen in the US zone of the base.

A report by The Washington Post in November 2005 claimed that terrorist suspects had been interrogated and tortured in secret CIA prisons in central and Eastern Europe, in the practice known as "extraordinary rendition." In 2007, Council of Europe investigator Dick Marty published a report saying that there had been the transfer of terrorist suspects and illegal detentions in Council of Europe 47-member states. The Council of Europe is an independent body that works on human rights issues.

Polish governments have vehemently denied the existence of such facilities, although according to a report by the Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza, state prosecutors have obtained a confidential document containing evidence of such a CIA base in Poland. The left-wing government of Leszek Miller signed an anti-terrorism cooperation agreement with the US in 2002.

-- DPA/Expatica