TRIPOLI: Documents found at the abandoned office of Libya's former spymaster appear to provide new details of the close relations the CIA shared with the Libyan intelligence service - suggesting that the Americans sent terrorism suspects at least eight times for questioning in Libya despite that country's reputation for torture.

Although it has been known that Western intelligence services began cooperating with Libya after it abandoned its program to build unconventional weapons in 2004, the files left behind as show that the cooperation was much more extensive than generally known with both the CIA and its British equivalent, MI-6.

Some documents indicate that the British agency was even willing to trace phone numbers for the Libyans, and another appears to be a proposed speech written by the Americans for Col Muammar Gaddafi about renouncing unconventional weapons.

The documents were discovered on Friday by journalists and Human Rights Watch. There were at least three binders of English-language documents, one marked CIA and the other two marked MI-6, among a stash of documents in Arabic.

It was impossible to verify their authenticity, and none of them were written on letterhead. But the binders included some documents that made specific reference to the CIA, and their details seem consistent with what is known about the transfer of terrorism suspects for interrogation .