Olsztyn-Mazury Airport

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Olsztyn-Mazury Airport
Olsztyn Mazury Airport.svg
Olsztyn-Mazury Airport (Poland)
Red pog.svg
Characteristics
ICAO code EPSY
IATA code SZY
Coordinates

53 ° 28 '55 "  N , 20 ° 56' 16"  E Coordinates: 53 ° 28 '55 "  N , 20 ° 56' 16"  E

Height above MSL 141 m (463  ft )
Transport links
Distance from the city center 10 km from Szczytno,
58 km from Olsztyn
Street DK57
train Regional train to Olsztyn and Szczytno
Local transport Bus to Olsztyn and Szczytno
Basic data
opening Reopening on January 20, 2016
operator Warmia i Mazury Sp. Z oo
surface 322 ha
Terminals 1
Passengers 104 851 (2017)
Air freight 0t
Flight
movements
2400 (2017)
Capacity
( PAX per year)
500,000
Start-and runway
01/19 2500 m × 45 m concrete

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The airport Olsztyn-Mazury (old: Szczytno-Szymany ) is a Polish regional airport in the village Szymany ( German  United Schiemanen ) located about ten kilometers from the city center Szczytnos ( German  Ortelsburg ) in the Warmia and Mazury is in the north of Poland. This airport is the only one in the Warmian-Masurian Voivodeship. Flight operations were suspended from the end of 2006 to the end of 2015. The airport became internationally known because Poland allowed the US secret service CIA to fly in prisoners from 2002, who were then brought to the military base of Stare Kiejkuty for extra-territorial torture interrogations . Poland had left parts of the military base there to the CIA; it was the largest secret prison ( Black Site ) outside the United States.

history

The airport was built as a military airfield in the 1950s . After the air force had no further use for the airport, it was leased to a private company in 1996 by the Polish Agencja Mienia Wojskowego (Agency for Military Properties) in order to continue operating it as a civil airport. From 1996 the airport was mainly used for general aviation and charter flights ; However, there was also seasonal scheduled service in summer.

Use by the CIA

In 2005 the airport became internationally known. After the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City on September 11, 2001, the CIA opened secret prisons around the world , which were the hubs of a secret program for the kidnapping of prisoners. Some countries allowed the US secret service to maintain secret prisons, so-called black sites , on their territory . It is said to have been like that in Afghanistan, Thailand, Romania and Lithuania. When the black sites in Thailand closed, Poland allowed the CIA to operate a secret prison in Stare Kiejkuty , near the airport, where suspects of Islamic terrorism were held, interrogated and tortured - which is also contrary to Polish law.

The Council of Europe and several human rights organizations only got involved when lawyers filed lawsuits against Poland for two of the Americans suspected of terrorism, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri and Abu Zubaydah. In June 2007, the special investigator of the published Europe , Dick Marty , its Report into secret detention by the CIA transports. According to this report, his investigations revealed that between 2002 and 2005 there had been "at least 10 flights with at least 4 different aircraft" which were related to the secret prisons. The investigation report describes the most important flights as:

Aircraft registration Departed in Landed in Szymany on
N63MU Dubai 0December 5, 2002, 2:56 p.m.
N379P Rabat 0February 8, 2003, 2:23 am
N379P Kabul 0March 7, 2003, 4:00 p.m.
N379P Kabul March 25, 2003, 6:03 p.m.
N379P Kabul 0June 5, 2003, 1:00 am
N379P Kabul July 30, 2003, 2:58 am
N313P Kabul September 22, 2003, 9:00 p.m.
N63MU Kabul July 28, 2005

In the report, Marty writes:

“We have been confirmed eight names of 'High Value Detainees' - each name from more than one source - recorded in Poland between 2003 and 2005. More precisely, our sources within the CIA called us Poles as the 'Black Site' where Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed were held and questioned using 'advanced interrogation techniques'. "

Marty also writes that it is "remarkable that the well-known prisoner transport aircraft N379P made a secret flight from Kabul to Szymany on March 7, 2003, less than a week after the arrest of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed," one of the alleged perpetrators of the attacks September 11, 2001. It is therefore possible that Szymany Airport was used to transfer CIA prisoners to a secret prison on the nearby base of the Polish foreign secret service in Stare Kiejkuty ( Alt Keykuth ).

The Polish judiciary was also forced to initiate an investigation in August 2008.

The Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights announced on February 21, 2010 at a press conference in Warsaw by board member Adam Bodnar that between February and September 2003 there had been six aircraft movements from Afghanistan and one from Morocco to Szymany airfield. The aircraft would have had the registration numbers N63MU, N379P and N313P. This information resulted from official information. According to Bodnar from the Helsinki Foundation, the confirmation that CIA machines had landed in Poland does not yet prove that there were secret CIA prisons in Poland. All Polish governments have vehemently denied such allegations.

The then head of the Polish secret service, Zbigniew Siemiątkowski , was about to be charged, but the responsible investigator was withdrawn - and the proceedings were handed over to Krakow without giving reasons . When the investigators in Krakow then requested a further, unlimited extension in April 2013, the European Court of Human Rights reacted by announcing that it would now publish the trial documents submitted by Poland. To this day, then President Aleksander Kwaśniewski claims not to have known that the Americans were illegally detaining or even torturing suspected terrorists in Poland. It should have been he who requested the closure. A Boeing 737 with what is believed to be the last prisoner of Stare Kiejkuty took off in Poland on September 22, 2003.

In 2014, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg sentenced the Republic of Poland to pay compensation for pain and suffering of 100,000 and 130,000 euros to two prison inmates from the Black Site in Stare Kiejkuty near Szczytno .

Recommissioning

Terminal building with glass, wood and natural stone inside

In 2005 the Irish airline Ryanair showed interest in regular flights to Szymany. However, Ryanair expected repair work on the runway and an expansion of the airport terminal. The cost of the required construction work was estimated at around 1.5 million zlotys. In October 2006, the airport company and Agencja Mienia Wojskowego signed an initial five-year lease with an extension option. After that, the airport company sought financial support for the airport expansion. At the end of 2006 the airport was closed. At a press conference called by the airport company on January 13, 2007, the chairman of the company, Jarosław Jurczenko, made the voivodeship administration responsible for the airport company's impending bankruptcy and announced that the public prosecutor would be involved.

For the reopening of the airport, especially for the region Olsztyn , which was railway Olsztyn Pisz and for more than ten years disused railway line renewed towards the airport. The airport terminal was provided with a siding. The work of the first construction phase was completed in 2013. The regular service was restarted in Olsztyn-Mazury on January 21, 2016.

Expansion stage II, the construction of a 1.6 km new route on PKP line No. 35 (Ostrołęka – Szczytno) from the airport terminal to Szymany station and the construction of a signal box with the corresponding infrastructure was completed in 2015. The airport train station is called Lotnisko Szymany .

Start of operations

The regular service was restarted in Olsztyn-Mazury on January 21, 2016. The first destinations were Berlin-Tegel and Krakow, which were served by the Sprintair airline . On June 6, 2016, Sprintair started the connection to Wroclaw . From June 17, 2016, Adria Airways started the connection to Munich three times a week. All these connections were set up again after a short operating time.

Current operation

From June 18, 2016, Wizz Air opened the connection to London-Luton three times a week. From July 2nd, 2016, LOT started the connection to Warsaw three times a week. From November 1, 2016, Ryanair became the fifth airline to connect to London-Stansted . On October 11, 2016, Wizzair announced that they would be flying to Oslo twice a week from May 20, 2017 . From May 14, 2018, Wizzair will be flying to Dortmund twice a week.

Transport links

Szymany Lotnisko stop

Szymany Lotnisko railway station

The airport can be reached by train from Olsztyn and Szczytno on the Olsztyn – Ełk railway line . The route is served by a Przewozy Regionalne rail bus. The airport is the sixth in Poland (after Krakow, Warsaw-Chopin, Szczecin, Lublin and Gdansk) with a direct rail link.

Bus and private transport

In addition, the airport is served directly by bus routes. The travel time to Szczytno is about 15 minutes and to Olsztyn about an hour.

Car rental companies such as AVIS and Hertz are based at the airport .

Web links

Commons : Olsztyn-Mazury airport  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Footnotes

  1. ^ "Illegal acts": Germany rejects allegations on Süddeutsche.de, June 8, 2007.
  2. BBC News: Hunt for CIA 'black site' in Poland. December 28, 2006.
  3. ^ Library Briefing - Library of the European Parliament, Piotr Bąkowski: Extraordinary rendition of terrorism suspects. January 18, 2012, p. 5. European Parliament website (PDF).
  4. ^ Diepresse.com, Helsinki Foundation has evidence of CIA flights to Poland , February 22, 2010
  5. ^ CIA flights to Poland apparently confirmed (chargeable), in: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of February 23, 2010
  6. a b CIA torture in Poland in the forest of horror In: Süddeutsche Zeitung. February 7, 2013.
  7. ^ Illegal CIA prison in Poland. The human rights court sees Warsaw as an accomplice. Spiegel Online , July 24, 2014, accessed May 23, 2015 .
  8. Poland convicted of CIA prison. (No longer available online.) Wiener Zeitung , July 24, 2014, archived from the original on October 23, 2015 ; accessed on May 23, 2015 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.wienerzeitung.at
  9. Poland pays compensation for pain and suffering because of imprisonment in the CIA prison. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , May 18, 2015, accessed on May 21, 2015 .
  10. Preussische Allgemeine Zeitung / episode 48-10 of December 4, 2010.
  11. ^ Preußische Allgemeine Zeitung / episode 30-11 of July 30, 2011.
  12. Expansion plans for PKP routes 35 and 219 ( Memento of the original from June 7, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (Polish). @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.plk-inwestycje.pl
  13. Flying should become easier, Preussische Allgemeine Zeitung / episode 02-12 of January 14, 2012.
  14. Expansion plans for PKP lines 35 and 219. (No longer available online.) Archived from the original on June 7, 2014 ; Retrieved June 3, 2014 (Polish). Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.plk-inwestycje.pl
  15. Port Olsztyn-Mazury z nowym przewoźnikiem. April 3, 2016, accessed February 20, 2016 (Polish).
  16. Port Lotniczy Olsztyn-Mazury z nowym połączeniem już od czerwca. April 7, 2016, accessed February 20, 2016 (Polish).
  17. Pasazer.com: LOT Poleci do Szyman. In: Pasazer.com. Retrieved June 15, 2016 (Polish).