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A needless self-inflicted wound.
The Berlusconi Administration is perhaps in Europe the best disposed towards the US and would have been accommodative of a request for Nasr.
Using US diplomats for the kidnapping operation and flying Nasr out of Italy from a US Airbase was not a smart thing to do.
NYT
The Berlusconi Administration is perhaps in Europe the best disposed towards the US and would have been accommodative of a request for Nasr.
Using US diplomats for the kidnapping operation and flying Nasr out of Italy from a US Airbase was not a smart thing to do.
June 24, 2005
Italian Judge Orders Arrest of 13 CIA Operatives for Kidnapping
By STEPHEN GREY
and DON VAN NATTA Jr.
MILAN, June 24 - An Italian judge has ordered the arrest of 13 operatives of the Central Intelligence Agency accused of kidnapping an Egyptian cleric on a Milan street two years ago and sending him to a prison in Egypt for questioning, Italian prosecutors and investigators said today.
Judge Chiara Nobili of Milan signed the arrest warrants on Thursday for 13 people the documents identified as C.I.A. operatives suspected of seizing the radical imam Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, also known as Abu Omar, as he walked to his mosque here for noon prayers on Feb. 17, 2003.
His family says that he has been tortured by his Egyptian captors.
Investigators said the court documents, which remain under seal, identify the 13 operatives by their real names as well as their cover names. In the warrants, Judge Nobili said that all 13 suspects were linked to the C.I.A. and that several served as diplomats at the United States Consulate in Milan, investigators said.
The judge's action represents the first time that American operatives face prosecution by a foreign criminal justice system for carrying out the C.I.A.'s policy of "extraordinary rendition," the legal term for the agency's practice of seizing terror suspects in one country and delivering them to be detained in another, including countries that routinely engage in torture. Since Sept. 11, 2001, more than 100 terrorism suspects have been transferred by the United States to Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Pakistan, Uzbekistan and other countries, where some former captives have said they were tortured.
C.I.A. officials have declined to discuss details of such cases, but senior officials have defended the practice, which began a decade ago, as a legal way to thwart terrorist activities. The C.I.A. usually carries out such renditions with the backing of foreign governments, but the Italian authorities said they knew of no such agreement between Italy and the United States in the case of Mr. Nasr.
The chief C.I.A. spokeswoman, Jennifer Millerwise, declined to comment on the Italian charges. Spokesmen at the United States Embassy in Rome and the United States Consulate in Milan also declined to comment about the arrest warrants. C.I.A. officials in Washington were unavailable for comment.
The existence of the arrest warrants was disclosed today by the Italian newspapers Corriere della Sera and Il Giorno. Several senior Italian investigators said they believed the 13 American operatives, 3 said to be women, had left Italy. If arrested and brought to trial, the operatives would face charges of criminal kidnapping.
Six other C.I.A. operatives, who are suspected of helping support the abduction, are also under criminal investigation, Italian investigators said.
It is not known whether the Italian government gave approval for the C.I.A. to carry out a rendition operation in Milan, but some public officials were demanding to know.
Paolo Cento of the Green Party, the vice president of the lower house justice committee, called on the interior and defense ministers to tell Parliament whether the Italian authorities had been alerted by the Americans before the imam's kidnapping in Milan. Calling for "political clarification," Mr. Cento said, "we want to know if American operatives have freedom of action on our territory and how, if that is the case, the government intends to protect the prerogative of our sovereignty."
In interviews in recent months, several former American intelligence officials have said they would be shocked if any operations carried out by the Central Intelligence Agency in Italy had not been approved in advance by the Italian intelligence service. But the former officials also allowed that there was increasing concern at the Central Intelligence Agency's directorate of operations that some post-9/11 actions in which the C.I.A. had acted aggressively against terror suspects captured abroad might lead to indictments in foreign countries.
Italian investigators were not unanimous on whether some Italian officials might have been aware of or even approved of the cleric's abduction.
"There is no shadow of proof of any Italian involvement," one senior investigator said. "Our investigations were across the board, and it was a brilliant example of police investigation and nothing emerged. Mind you, if someone came to tell us that the Italians were involved, we'd open up the investigation again."
But a second senior Italian investigator speculated that it was possible that the Italian government had approved the operation because the C.I.A. operatives had operated openly and without apparent concern that their activities might be detected.
For instance, this official said, the American operatives used their Italian cellphones to communicate when Mr. Nasr was abducted; they kept the phones switched on for hours at a time, making tracking of their movements easier; they dialed sensitive numbers in the United States, including a number at C.I.A. headquarters in Virginia; and they provided their real names to car rental agencies.
This openness helped the special police retrace nearly every step that the American operatives made during the nine days that they were in Milan for the operation. The Italian special police forces initially assumed that the operation was conducted by Italian and American officials, but the evidence they found was limited to the Americans, investigators said.
To track the operatives' movements, investigators said they had used the records of cellphone calls and stays in good-quality Milan hotels, like the Hilton, Sheraton, Galia and Principe di Savoia. Investigators said they subsequently learned the identities and cover names of the 13 operatives that are now contained in the arrest warrants. The Italian investigators have also collected photocopies of their passports, photographs, the Italian cellphone numbers that they used, and their MasterCard and VISA credit card numbers. They also have obtained the American addresses used by the 13 operatives.
Mr. Nasr, a 42-year-old Egyptian-born cleric, came to the attention of counterterrorism officials here in 1997, shortly after he arrived in Italy from Albania. After the Sept. 11 attacks, he was identified by American and Italian intelligence officials as a jihadist who supported Al Qaeda and who had fought in Afghanistan and Bosnia, investigators said.
At the time that he disappeared, the Italian authorities were investigating the possibility that Mr. Nasr was trying to recruit jihadists through his mosque in Milan. The Italian police and prosecutors have aggressively treated Mr. Nasr's disappearance as a missing person's case.
Witnesses told police that at noon on Feb. 17, 2003, two or three Italian-speaking men approached Mr. Nasr as he walked on the sidewalk of the Via Guerzoni. They asked Mr. Nasr to show them his ID card, witnesses told the police. The men then sprayed him in the face with chemicals and forced him into a white van that quickly sped away, witnesses said. Since that day, the Italian police and prosecutors, led by the Milan prosecutor Armando Spataro, have treated Mr. Nasr's disappearance as a missing person case.
Investigators say they have evidence that Mr. Nasr was taken within hours of his disappearance to the United States military base at Aviano, in northern Italy, where he was put aboard an aircraft, taken to Egypt on Feb. 18, and jailed there. In April 2004, they said, he emerged from jail in Alexandria, Egypt, and later phoned his wife in Milan and an associate to say that he had been subjected to electric shock treatments. He told his wife that he had been tortured so badly by his captors in Cairo that he had lost hearing in one ear, investigators say. Shortly after placing that call, he was rearrested by the Egyptian police, investigators say, and his whereabouts are now unknown.
Milan's chief prosecutor, Manlio Claudio Minale, said in a statement that he would ask both the Egyptian and the American authorities to assist in the case.
If proven at trial, the kidnapping of Mr. Nasr amounts to "a serious breach of Italian law," a senior Italian investigator said, speaking on condition of anonymity. "It's absolutely illegal."
That official added that the C.I.A.'s rendition of Mr. Nasr had disrupted Italian efforts to identify his connection to a terror network believed to have active operations throughout Europe.
"The international community must struggle against terrorism and international terrorist groups in accordance with international laws and the rights of the defendants," the official said. "Otherwise, we are giving victory to the terrorists."
Stephen Grey reported from Milan for this article and Don Van Natta Jr. from London. Reporting was contributed by Doug Jehl in Washington, Ian Fisher and Jason Horowitz in Rome and Elisabetta Povoledo of the International Herald Tribune in Milan.
Italian Judge Orders Arrest of 13 CIA Operatives for Kidnapping
By STEPHEN GREY
and DON VAN NATTA Jr.
MILAN, June 24 - An Italian judge has ordered the arrest of 13 operatives of the Central Intelligence Agency accused of kidnapping an Egyptian cleric on a Milan street two years ago and sending him to a prison in Egypt for questioning, Italian prosecutors and investigators said today.
Judge Chiara Nobili of Milan signed the arrest warrants on Thursday for 13 people the documents identified as C.I.A. operatives suspected of seizing the radical imam Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, also known as Abu Omar, as he walked to his mosque here for noon prayers on Feb. 17, 2003.
His family says that he has been tortured by his Egyptian captors.
Investigators said the court documents, which remain under seal, identify the 13 operatives by their real names as well as their cover names. In the warrants, Judge Nobili said that all 13 suspects were linked to the C.I.A. and that several served as diplomats at the United States Consulate in Milan, investigators said.
The judge's action represents the first time that American operatives face prosecution by a foreign criminal justice system for carrying out the C.I.A.'s policy of "extraordinary rendition," the legal term for the agency's practice of seizing terror suspects in one country and delivering them to be detained in another, including countries that routinely engage in torture. Since Sept. 11, 2001, more than 100 terrorism suspects have been transferred by the United States to Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Pakistan, Uzbekistan and other countries, where some former captives have said they were tortured.
C.I.A. officials have declined to discuss details of such cases, but senior officials have defended the practice, which began a decade ago, as a legal way to thwart terrorist activities. The C.I.A. usually carries out such renditions with the backing of foreign governments, but the Italian authorities said they knew of no such agreement between Italy and the United States in the case of Mr. Nasr.
The chief C.I.A. spokeswoman, Jennifer Millerwise, declined to comment on the Italian charges. Spokesmen at the United States Embassy in Rome and the United States Consulate in Milan also declined to comment about the arrest warrants. C.I.A. officials in Washington were unavailable for comment.
The existence of the arrest warrants was disclosed today by the Italian newspapers Corriere della Sera and Il Giorno. Several senior Italian investigators said they believed the 13 American operatives, 3 said to be women, had left Italy. If arrested and brought to trial, the operatives would face charges of criminal kidnapping.
Six other C.I.A. operatives, who are suspected of helping support the abduction, are also under criminal investigation, Italian investigators said.
It is not known whether the Italian government gave approval for the C.I.A. to carry out a rendition operation in Milan, but some public officials were demanding to know.
Paolo Cento of the Green Party, the vice president of the lower house justice committee, called on the interior and defense ministers to tell Parliament whether the Italian authorities had been alerted by the Americans before the imam's kidnapping in Milan. Calling for "political clarification," Mr. Cento said, "we want to know if American operatives have freedom of action on our territory and how, if that is the case, the government intends to protect the prerogative of our sovereignty."
In interviews in recent months, several former American intelligence officials have said they would be shocked if any operations carried out by the Central Intelligence Agency in Italy had not been approved in advance by the Italian intelligence service. But the former officials also allowed that there was increasing concern at the Central Intelligence Agency's directorate of operations that some post-9/11 actions in which the C.I.A. had acted aggressively against terror suspects captured abroad might lead to indictments in foreign countries.
Italian investigators were not unanimous on whether some Italian officials might have been aware of or even approved of the cleric's abduction.
"There is no shadow of proof of any Italian involvement," one senior investigator said. "Our investigations were across the board, and it was a brilliant example of police investigation and nothing emerged. Mind you, if someone came to tell us that the Italians were involved, we'd open up the investigation again."
But a second senior Italian investigator speculated that it was possible that the Italian government had approved the operation because the C.I.A. operatives had operated openly and without apparent concern that their activities might be detected.
For instance, this official said, the American operatives used their Italian cellphones to communicate when Mr. Nasr was abducted; they kept the phones switched on for hours at a time, making tracking of their movements easier; they dialed sensitive numbers in the United States, including a number at C.I.A. headquarters in Virginia; and they provided their real names to car rental agencies.
This openness helped the special police retrace nearly every step that the American operatives made during the nine days that they were in Milan for the operation. The Italian special police forces initially assumed that the operation was conducted by Italian and American officials, but the evidence they found was limited to the Americans, investigators said.
To track the operatives' movements, investigators said they had used the records of cellphone calls and stays in good-quality Milan hotels, like the Hilton, Sheraton, Galia and Principe di Savoia. Investigators said they subsequently learned the identities and cover names of the 13 operatives that are now contained in the arrest warrants. The Italian investigators have also collected photocopies of their passports, photographs, the Italian cellphone numbers that they used, and their MasterCard and VISA credit card numbers. They also have obtained the American addresses used by the 13 operatives.
Mr. Nasr, a 42-year-old Egyptian-born cleric, came to the attention of counterterrorism officials here in 1997, shortly after he arrived in Italy from Albania. After the Sept. 11 attacks, he was identified by American and Italian intelligence officials as a jihadist who supported Al Qaeda and who had fought in Afghanistan and Bosnia, investigators said.
At the time that he disappeared, the Italian authorities were investigating the possibility that Mr. Nasr was trying to recruit jihadists through his mosque in Milan. The Italian police and prosecutors have aggressively treated Mr. Nasr's disappearance as a missing person's case.
Witnesses told police that at noon on Feb. 17, 2003, two or three Italian-speaking men approached Mr. Nasr as he walked on the sidewalk of the Via Guerzoni. They asked Mr. Nasr to show them his ID card, witnesses told the police. The men then sprayed him in the face with chemicals and forced him into a white van that quickly sped away, witnesses said. Since that day, the Italian police and prosecutors, led by the Milan prosecutor Armando Spataro, have treated Mr. Nasr's disappearance as a missing person case.
Investigators say they have evidence that Mr. Nasr was taken within hours of his disappearance to the United States military base at Aviano, in northern Italy, where he was put aboard an aircraft, taken to Egypt on Feb. 18, and jailed there. In April 2004, they said, he emerged from jail in Alexandria, Egypt, and later phoned his wife in Milan and an associate to say that he had been subjected to electric shock treatments. He told his wife that he had been tortured so badly by his captors in Cairo that he had lost hearing in one ear, investigators say. Shortly after placing that call, he was rearrested by the Egyptian police, investigators say, and his whereabouts are now unknown.
Milan's chief prosecutor, Manlio Claudio Minale, said in a statement that he would ask both the Egyptian and the American authorities to assist in the case.
If proven at trial, the kidnapping of Mr. Nasr amounts to "a serious breach of Italian law," a senior Italian investigator said, speaking on condition of anonymity. "It's absolutely illegal."
That official added that the C.I.A.'s rendition of Mr. Nasr had disrupted Italian efforts to identify his connection to a terror network believed to have active operations throughout Europe.
"The international community must struggle against terrorism and international terrorist groups in accordance with international laws and the rights of the defendants," the official said. "Otherwise, we are giving victory to the terrorists."
Stephen Grey reported from Milan for this article and Don Van Natta Jr. from London. Reporting was contributed by Doug Jehl in Washington, Ian Fisher and Jason Horowitz in Rome and Elisabetta Povoledo of the International Herald Tribune in Milan.
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