Parliamentarians in Lithuania have voted to launch an investigation into allegations that the CIA operated a clandestine prison in the Baltic state to hold 'suspected al-Qaeda terrorists.'

The lawmakers have asked the National Security and Defense Committee of the parliament to find out whether Lithuania had hosted al-Qaeda suspects in secret prisons and, if so, whether Lithuanian state authorities were aware of it.

"We will seek to establish whether such a prison existed in Lithuania, and whether any (CIA) prisoners were moved through the country," said Arvydas Anusauskas, the chairman of the parliament's national security and defense committee, Reuters reported Thursday.

"If we show our investigation to be deep and wide ranging, I hope our conclusions can be trusted, but I don't exclude the possibility (that) we may fail to establish such a prison existed," he added.

In August, the US-based ABC News alleged in a report, citing unnamed former intelligence officials, that a secret CIA prison operated near Vilnius airport from early 2004 to late 2005, and that CIA planes flew into Lithuania with high-profile al-Qaeda suspects.

Ruling out the allegations, the Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaite said: "If this is true, Lithuania has to clean up, accept responsibility, apologize, and promise that it will never happen again."

The CIA's "black site" prisons were the locations of American detention centers overseas, where some of the most extreme forms of torture under the CIA's extraordinary rendition program took place.

RB/MB