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Swedish officers watched as the CIA operatives pulled out scissors and rapidly sliced off the prisoners’ clothes, including their underwear, according to newly released Swedish government documents and eyewitness statements. They probed inside the men’s mouths and ears and examined their hair before dressing the pair in sweat suits and draping hoods over their heads. The suspects were then marched in chains to the plane, where they were strapped to mattresses on the floor in the back of the cabin.

So began an operation the CIA calls an “extraordinary rendition,” the forcible and highly secret transfer of terrorism suspects to their home countries or other nations where they can be interrogated with fewer legal protections.

“I can say that we were surprised when a crew stepped out of the plane that seemed to be very professional, that had obviously done this before,” Arne Andersson, an assistant director for the Swedish national security police, told government investigators.

At 9:47 p.m., less than an hour after its arrival at Bromma Airport, the jet took off on a five-hour flight to Cairo, where the prisoners, Ahmed Agiza and Muhammad Zery, were handed over to Egyptian security officials.

The CIA has not acknowledged playing any part in the expulsion of the two men. An agency spokesman in Washington declined to comment for this article, and U.S. Embassy officials in Stockholm also declined to answer questions.

The two Egyptians later told lawyers, relatives and Swedish diplomats that they were subjected to electric shocks and other forms of torture soon after their forced return to their country.

One Swedish officer walked up the steps of the aircraft to greet the crew and was surprised to see that the agents — a half-dozen or so Americans and two Egyptians — were wearing hoods with semi-opaque fabric around the face, even though the small airport was essentially deserted.

“I told them that you don’t need to wear hoods because there is no one here,” the officer recalled in his statement to investigators. The foreign agents ignored him.

Swedish police officers said they couldn’t recall if the Egyptians had been forcibly medicated.

Investigators did find a report written by one of the Swedish officers that said Agiza and Zery were both “probably given a tranquilizer before takeoff.”

While investigators said they could not prove that the prisoners had been forcibly medicated, such a tactic would have violated Swedish law. link