Cleric abducted in Milan wants ex-Italian, US spies jailed

Nov 6, 2009, 12:16 GMT

Cairo - An Egyptian cleric abducted from the streets of Milan in 2003 on Friday blasted a Milan court's conviction of 22 CIA officers and two Italian intelligence officers as insufficient.

In an interview with the London-based, Arabic-language daily al- Hayat, Hassan Moustafa Osama Nasr, better known as Abu Omar, called for the jailing of the former head of Italy's military intelligence agency, Nicollo Polari, and former CIA Milan station chief Robert Seldon Lady.

'Robert Seldon Lady was present one of the times I was tortured,' he told al-Hayat.

On Wednesday an Italian court sentenced Lady to eight years in prison for his role in the abduction. The court sentenced 21 other CIA agents and a US military officer to five years in prison each. Two Italian military intelligence officers were each sentenced to three years in prison.

The US citizens were sentenced in absentia after Italy refused to forward the court's extradition requests to the United States. Three other US intelligence officials, including the former CIA station head in Rome, were granted diplomatic immunity, and the cases against them were dismissed.

The cases against five Italians, including Polari and his deputy, Marco Mancini, were dismissed on 'state secrets' grounds.

The court also granted a provisional award of 1 million euros (1.48 million dollars) to Abu Omar and 500,000 euros to his wife for the suffering they had endured. That award will now pass to a civil court in Milan.

Abu Omar on Friday said he intended to press for recompense, noting the 1-million-euro award was provisional.

Abu Omar was walking down a street in Milan in February 2003 when CIA agents working with Italian intelligence officers pulled him into a car and sent him first to the US base at Rammstein, Germany, and from thence to his native Egypt, the court found.

In an 11-page letter written from his cell, Abu Omar detailed in excruciating detail his torture while in an Egyptian custody, saying he had been 'hanged like a goat and tortured with electric shocks,' and that the abuse had left him 'a wreck of a man.'

The Egyptian preacher was released without charge in 2007, 'following,' he said, 'pressure from the media and human-rights organisations,' and now lives in the Mediterranean city of Alexandria.

'I don't want to stay in Egypt,' Abu Omar told al-Hayat. 'The authorities won't let me travel for the Umrah or the Hajj (pilgrimages) for fear that they might be prosecuted for my torture.'

He said he wanted to return to Milan, where he had preached at a local mosque.

Wednesday's verdict was the first courtroom test of the US programme of 'extraordinary rendition,' whereby suspects are apprehended outside the United States and sent for interrogation to countries where torture is endemic.

A 2007 report endorsed by the European Parliament found that the CIA had run more than 1,000 rendition flights over European airspace between 2001 and 2007 alone.

'The CIA's rendition programme should be on trial in the United States,' said Joanne Mariner, director of the New York-based pressure group Human Rights Watch.

'It's not too late for the Obama administration to follow the Italian prosecutors' lead and launch serious criminal investigations.'