GENEVA, 14 July 2004 — The international Red Cross said yesterday it feared US officials were holding terror suspects secretly in locations across the world. The Geneva Conventions require the United States to give the Red Cross access to prisoners of war and other detainees. “We have access to people detained by the United States in Guantanamo Bay, Afghanistan and Iraq, but in our understanding there are people that are detained outside these places for which we haven’t received notification or access,” said Antonella Notari, a spokeswoman for the International Committee of the Red Cross.

The United States says it is cooperating with the organization and has allowed Red Cross delegates access to thousands of prisoners, including Saddam Hussein.

But Notari told The Associated Press that some suspects reported as arrested by the FBI on its website, or identified in media reports, are unaccounted for.

“Some of these people who have been reported to be arrested never showed up in any of the places of detention run by the US where we visit,” Notari said.

She said she had read media reports that some people are being held at Diego Garcia, a British-held island in the Indian Ocean used as a strategic military base by the United States, but the ICRC had not been notified of any prisoners there.

“We just simply have absolutely no confirmation of this in any formal way,” she said.

The US government has not officially responded to a Red Cross demand for notification of all detainees, including those held in undisclosed locations, she said.

That request was made by ICRC President Jakob Kellenberger in January during a visit to Washington that featured meetings with Secretary of State Colin Powell, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice.

“So far we haven’t had a satisfactory reply,” Notari said.

An army report on the abuses at Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib prison found that military police there “routinely held persons brought to them by other government agencies without accounting for them, knowing their identities, or even the reason for their detention.”