VIENNA, May 4: European Union representatives are to travel to the United States ‘shortly’ to be briefed in answer to European charges that the CIA secretly flew prisoners through Europe, US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said on Thursday.

“Representatives from the EU ... will be coming to the United States shortly, and we will have representatives from the US government who will be meeting with them to provide whatever additional details we can give consistent with of course the national security of our country,” Mr Gonzales told reporters after meeting European Union officials in Vienna.

Mr Gonzales said US officials had not commented publicly on the controversial issue because ‘obviously the United States as with every country is not engaged in a public debate or discussion about intelligence activities because you don’t want to alert your enemies about what you’re doing’.

He said that in the briefings to the EU the United States would ‘give as much information as we can, obviously consistent with our national security’.

European lawmakers probing the alleged CIA flights said they were met with a ‘wall of silence’ by Macedonian authorities during a fact-finding mission to the Balkans country.

The members of a European Parliament investigating committee said they had travelled to Skopje to find out if a German man had been abducted in Macedonia and taken to Afghanistan by US agents for questioning.

“We asked a lot of questions but we didn’t get very many answers to those questions,” said in Brussels Claudio Fava, the Italian lawmaker leading the inquiry. —AFP