WASHINGTON, Dec 7: The United States shut down two secret CIA prisons in Romania and Poland after a rights group reported their existence last month and has moved its detained terror suspects to North Africa, ABC news reported on Tuesday.

ABC news said US officials scrambled to move the detainees, all top Al Qaeda suspects, before US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s arrival in Romania as part of her four-nation European tour.

The US network quoted current and former CIA officers as saying the suspects were now in a new CIA facility in the North African desert.

The names of the suspects listed by ABC match the names of ‘ghost detainees’ published by Human Rights Watch in November.

Among them is Abu Zubayadah, a Palestinian who was first held in Thailand and then Poland and who is suspected of being a top Al Qaeda operational planner, according to Human Right Watch.

Other detainees are Mohammed Omar Abdel-Rahman, an Egyptian arrested in 2003 in Pakistan and suspected of involvement in terrorist plots in New York; Ramzi Binalshibh, a Yemeni suspected of involvement in the Sept 11 attacks and arrested in Sept 2002; and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, arrested in Pakistan in March 2003 and suspected of involvement in the Sept 11 attacks, the killing of Wall Street Journal journalist Daniel Pearl and the 2000 attack in Yemen on the US warship Cole.—AFP