Posted on 02/25/2005 10:12:26 AM PST by Pyro7480
Italy probes possible CIA role in abduction
By John Crewdson (Chicago) Tribune senior correspondent
An Italian prosecutor investigating the apparent kidnapping of a suspected Islamic militant in the streets of Milan served military authorities this week with a demand for records of flights into and out of a joint U.S.-Italian air base in northern Italy.
Italian newspapers have reported that the prosecutor, Armando Spataro, is investigating the possible role of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency in the disappearance of Osama Nasr Mostafa Hassan, better known as Abu Omar, a popular figure in Milan's Islamic community who vanished Feb. 17, 2003.
Spataro, a chief prosecutor in Milan, said by phone Thursday that "I can confirm only that yesterday I went to Aviano," as the air base is known. "We have an investigation," he added, "but it's secret."
Bruno Megele, a top anti-terrorist police investigator who reportedly accompanied Spataro, declined to speak about the visit, which Italian newspapers described as unprecedented.
Spataro's warrant is believed to have sought information about the ownership and flight plans of non-military aircraft as well as records on vehicles arriving at and departing from Aviano in the hours before and after Omar's disappearance.
A passerby who claimed to have witnessed the abduction said several men grabbed Omar, a 41-year-old Egyptian national, on a Milan sidewalk and hustled him into a parked van that drove off accompanied by another car.
Since Sept. 11, 2001, several unnamed U.S. officials have been quoted by numerous media outlets discussing the U.S. practice of "rendition," in which suspected terrorists or Al Qaeda supporters captured abroad are sent for interrogation to countries where human rights are not universally respected.
The Tribune reported last month that a Gulfstream executive jet reportedly used to ferry some suspected terrorists to Egypt and other countries was owned by Bayard Foreign Marketing LLC, a Portland, Ore., company that appears to exist only on paper.
A break from practice
Most renditions in which the CIA is known or suspected to have taken part involve individuals captured on the battlefield or arrested by authorities in the countries where they reside.
Neither was the case with Abu Omar, which has opened the door to the possible criminal prosecution of those involved. Spataro was quoted earlier as saying that if any Americans played a part in Omar's abduction, "it would be a serious breach of Italian law."
The newspaper La Repubblica reported last week that some targets of the investigation worked for the CIA. The leading Italian newspaper, Corriere della Sera of Milan, said Thursday that "at least 15 persons have been under investigation for months."
Another paper, Il Giorno, reported that all 15 were CIA employees. One source told the Tribune that the police are satisfied that they know the identities of those who carried out the abduction, and that Spataro is now trying to determine at what level the action was approved.
A CIA spokeswoman had no comment. Ben Duffy, a spokesman at the U.S. Embassy in Rome, said officials there were "trying to figure out what's going on." The CIA also has satellite facilities at the U.S. Consulate in Milan and at the Aviano air base.
The base's chief of public affairs, Capt. Eric Elliott, confirmed that Spataro had met with the Italian base commander on Wednesday. Although the base is owned and commanded by the Italian air force, many of the fighters and bombers based there are from the U.S. and are flown by U.S. pilots.
Elliott said U.S. authorities at the base intended to "respond appropriately to requests for information from the Italian authorities in accordance with existing agreements."
That presumably would include records of any flights by the mysterious Gulfstream jet. The first public mention of the aircraft appeared six weeks after the Sept. 11 hijacking attacks, when a Pakistani newspaper reported that Jamil Qasim Saeed Mohammed, a 27-year-old microbiology student at Karachi University, had been spirited aboard the plane at Karachi's airport by Pakistani security officers.
There is still no information about where Mohammed may have been taken. But Pakistani officials said later that the U.S. believed Mohammed, a Yemeni national, belonged to Al Qaeda and had information about the October 2000 bombing of the USS Cole while it was refueling in the Yemeni port of Aden.
Another well-documented rendition involving the same plane occurred in December 2001, when two Egyptian nationals, Ahmed Agiza and Muhammed al-Zery, were flown aboard the Gulfstream from Sweden's Bromma airport to Cairo. A Swedish television channel, TV4, reported last year that the plane's registration number was N379P, which would make it the aircraft acquired by Bayard Foreign Marketing last Nov. 16.
The Sunday Times of London, which said it had obtained the Gulfstream's flight logs, reported in November that the plane was based at Dulles International Airport outside Washington and had flown to at least 49 destinations outside the U.S., including Egypt, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Jordan, Iraq, Morocco, Afghanistan, Libya and Uzbekistan.
Stefano Dambruoso, Milan's anti-terrorist prosecutor at the time of Omar's disappearance, said he suspected from the beginning that Omar had been kidnapped, noting that he had no apparent reason to flee or to leave his wife, a teacher at a private Islamic school in Milan.
Initial suspicion focused on the Egyptian intelligence services, which are believed to have kidnapped another Egyptian militant, Talaat Fouad Kassem, under similar circumstances in Yugoslavia in 1995.
The Egyptian Embassy in Washington did not respond to requests for comment by voice mail and e-mail. The Egyptian foreign minister, Ahmed Aboul Gheit, recently told a group of Tribune reporters and editors that he had no personal knowledge of any torture of suspected terrorists by his government.
Aboul Gheit did not deny the possibility that renditions had taken place, although he said he had no evidence of that either. "Are we to be blamed," he asked rhetorically, "if the Americans are delivering people to us, our own nationals?"
Call helps establish link
Spataro was able to link Omar's disappearance to Aviano through records of cell phone calls made by his abductors as they drove the 175 miles to the air base from Milan, Corriere della Sera reported Thursday. The calls included conversations with someone at the base, the paper said.
The newspaper reported last year that, about 14 months after his disappearance, Omar telephoned his wife from Cairo to tell her he had been released from prison by the Egyptians.
During that conversation, monitored by an Italian police wiretap, Omar reportedly told his wife that he had been kidnapped by American and Italian agents, "narcoticized," and, after several hours of questioning at Aviano, flown aboard a small plane to Egypt.
Once there, he said, he was imprisoned and tortured by the Mukhabarat, the Egyptian intelligence service. The Italian police said Omar was re-arrested by the Egyptians a few weeks after that phone call and has not been heard from since.
One person knowledgeable about Spataro's investigation said it has not turned up evidence of involvement by Italian intelligence agents in Omar's disappearance, and Italy's intelligence services do not have the power to make arrests or detain suspects in any event.
Omar, a native of Alexandria, Egypt, reportedly fought with Muslim forces in Afghanistan and Bosnia during the 1980s and 1990s, and was arrested in Albania in 1996 and charged with planning an attack on the Egyptian foreign minister.
Following his release by the Albanians, Omar was granted political asylum by Italy in 1997. He spent the next several years as an imam, or preacher, at a popular mosque in Milan.
Omar's post-Sept. 11 meetings with known Al Qaeda operators and his recruitment of militant fighters for jihadist battles--an activity that an Italian court declared earlier this month did not violate that country's laws--eventually brought Omar to the attention of police. Their listening devices reportedly picked up a conversation in which Omar talked of mounting a car bomb attack against a public bus in Milan.
The subsequent discovery that Omar had been taken to Egypt has raised questions about the fate of the former Al Qaeda chief in Italy, Abdelkader Mahmoud Es Sayed, another Egyptian Islamist who disappeared from Milan two months before Sept. 11.
Like Es Sayed, Omar was one of several Egyptian militants opposed to the government of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak who were granted political asylum by the Italian government.
Es Sayed, better known as Abu Saleh, was at first believed by authorities to have made his way to Afghanistan and later to have died there in an allied bombing attack. He was convicted in absentia in Egypt for his alleged role in the killings of 58 foreign tourists at Luxor in November 1997.
A proper disappearance, in my view.
Maybe the prosecutor should take warm and cuddly little Omar home and give him a nice warm place to stay. Then again, maybe the US will tell the prosecutor to go drop dead and he'll never find his loveable little terrorist.
Italy is making way too big a deal about the kidnapping of a terrorist who was planning bomb attacks in its cities.We should be so lucky to have more of these kidnappings of terrorists.
Yeah!
I'm just POSTIVE that CIA operatives are going to annouce their plans and use military planes to 'secret' someone out of Italy!
Hmmm...lemme think about this. Gulfstream 5?
Wasn't it John Kerry Heinz who had a Gulfstream?
Could he be assisting...naaah!
I recall President Bush's speech after September 11. Something to the effect: "We will kill them in the alleys where where they conspire. We will interrupt their access to money. We will observe their families so that they will have to keep moving..."
I would like to go back to some to the early stories when we were all so fired up and committed to getting these guys.
This dropped off most people's radar sceen when Iraq became the topic of conversation. But perhaps the effort continues.
I would assume that because of this, some of them committed suicide by shooting themselves in the back of the head several times.
Git 'er done, George!!
It does and it will continue. Remember the Prez telling us that there will be battles won that we will nothing about. This is just one small blip on that screen. Me thinks Armando might want to find another place to put his nose.
I find these kind of stories very encouraging. So what if we ruffle some no-name DA's feathers. I'm sure we had approval, tacit approval at a minimum, by the Italian authoroties to get this pig dung off their streets. Just think if we had Gore in charge, do you think they would be willing to do what it takes, including "renditioning"?
Remember, this terrorist disappeared two years and now its just one prosecutor making some noise. We have grand-standing, politically motivated prosecutors in the USA, too. The Italian government is quiet. Berlusconi is a good ally.
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