An Italian judge has issued arrest warrants for 13 CIA agents who allegedly kidnapped an Egyptian terrorist suspect in Milan two years ago and flew him to Cairo where he was questioned and tortured, it emerged on Friday.
The agents are said to have seized imam Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, also known as Abu Omar, while he was walking from his home to a mosque in the Italian city. They allegedly bundled the 42-year-old into a van before driving him to the Italian-US airbase at Aviano, northern Italy.
The following day he was flown to another US airbase at Ramstein, Germany, and then taken by private jet to Egypt.
According to Italian investigators, the alleged abduction, believed to be part of the CIA's "extraordinary rendition program" in which terrorist suspects are transferred to third countries without court approval, violated Italian sovereignty.
The Milan-based judge Chiara Nobili issued arrest warrants after reading a dossier about the alleged kidnap and how it took place.
Investigators have obtained a witness account from an Egyptian woman who said she heard Nasr calling for help in Arabic after he was stopped by two men dressed as Italian police officers, who then forced him into the back of a van and drove off at speed.
The investigators also claim to have traced the CIA agents through hotel bills that they ran up at Milan's best five-star hotels while allegedly preparing the kidnap plan.
They also allege that a pattern of cellphone calls bolsters their case. Several cellphones active at the time Nasr disappeared were found to be registered to false names and non-existent companies, and some were used to call CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.
The dossier further alleges that the day after the imam's disappearance, a Learjet with the sign Spar 92, which signifies an unidentifiable person is on board, took off from the Aviano airbase for Germany. Later, another Learjet, apparently hired from Boston's Sarasota Red Sox baseball team for US$6,000 an hour, flew Nasr to his home country.
Reports with the Corriere della Sera newspaper yesterday named the head of the alleged operation.
The US embassy in Rome has declined to comment.
US officials have yet to respond to the arrest warrants but the case is likely to embarrass the CIA, not least because many details about the kidnap plan have been leaked to Italian newspapers.
According to reports, the abduction would have been costly because the agents stayed in hotels such as the Hilton and the Principe di Savoia in Milan, running up bills of 120,000 euros (US$145,000) for food and accommodation alone.
After the imam was back in Egypt, senior agents celebrated the success of the job at a five-star hotel in Venice, and other agents were sent on holiday to other parts of Italy.
Nasr disappeared on Feb. 17, 2003. According to foreign intelligence officials, he fought with jihadists in Afghanistan and Bosnia before arriving in Italy in 1997 and obtaining political refugee status. He was under investigation in Italy on suspicion of ties to international terrorism at the time he disappeared.
Italian newspapers, citing wiretapped conversations, reported last year that Nasr had been released from custody in Egypt for reasons of ill-health and had called his wife and friends in Milan to say he had been tortured with electric shocks.
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