Italy Judge Orders Arrest of 13 CIA Agents
   
    By Aidan Lewis
    The Associated Press

    Friday 24 June 2005

    Rome - An Italian judge ordered the arrests of 13 people in the purported CIA abduction of an imam, who then was sent to Egypt, the Milan prosecutor's office said Friday. An Italian official said earlier the 13 were CIA officers involved in US anti-terrorism efforts.

    The 13 are suspected of seizing Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr, known as Abu Omar, on the streets of Milan on Feb. 17, 2003, and sending him to Egypt, where he reportedly was tortured, Milan prosecutor Manlio Claudio Minale said in a statement.

    An Italian newspaper said all 13 were American agents.

    The US Embassy in Rome and the CIA in Washington declined to comment.

    The prosecutor's statement did not name any of the suspects, give their nationalities or mention the CIA by name, but an Italian official familiar with the investigation confirmed newspaper reports Friday that the suspects were working for the CIA. The official requested anonymity because he was not authorized to release the information.

    Minale said the suspects remained at large, and Italian authorities would ask the United States and Egypt for assistance in the case.

    Prosecutors believe the officers seized Omar as part of the CIA's "extraordinary rendition" program, in which terror suspects are transferred to third countries without court approval, according to reports Friday in newspapers Corriere della Sera and Il Giorno.

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Italians Detail Lavish CIA Operation

13 Charged in '03 Abduction Allegedly Stayed in Finest Hotels

By Craig Whitlock
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, June 26, 2005; Page A18

MILAN, June 25 -- For 19 American intelligence operatives assigned to apprehend a radical Islamic preacher in Milan two years ago, the mission was equal parts James Bond and taxpayer-financed Italian holiday, according to an Italian investigation of the man's disappearance.

The Americans stayed at some of the finest hotels in Milan, sometimes for as long as six weeks, ringing up tabs of as much as $500 a day on Diners Club accounts created to match their recently forged identities, according to Italian court documents and other records. Then, after abducting their target and flying him to Cairo under the noses of Italian police, some of them rounded out their European trip with long weekends in Venice and Florence before leaving the country, the records show.

---snip---

While most of the operatives apparently used false identities, they left a long trail of paper and electronic records that enabled Italian investigators to retrace their movements in detail. Posing as tourists and business travelers, the Americans often stayed in the same five-star hotels, rarely paid in cash, gave their frequent traveler account numbers to desk clerks and made dozens of calls from unsecure phones in their rooms.

During January 2003, they were regular patrons at the Hotel Principe di Savoia in Milan, which bills itself as "one of the world's most luxuriously appointed hotels" and features a marble-lined spa and minibar Cokes that cost about $10. Seven of the Americans stayed at the 80-year-old hotel for periods ranging from three days to three weeks at nightly rates of about $450, racking up total expenses of more than $42,000 there.

WaPo LINK

CIA methods exposed by kidnap inquiry

Agents' use of commercial mobiles gives Italian police detailed picture of how Muslim cleric was abducted

John Hooper in Rome
Saturday July 2, 2005
The Guardian

"I was walking down Via Guerzoni with my little girl and I saw a man with a long beard and a djellaba being stopped by two westerners with a mobile telephone. They were asking him, in Italian, for his documents, the way the police do," the witness said.

"At the junction with Via Croce Viola there was a pale-coloured van on the pavement," she continued. "Then, all I heard was a loud noise like a thud. The van suddenly shot backwards and then set off again, away from the mosque, passing me at high speed. And the three people I'd seen, they weren't there any longer."

One of them was Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, otherwise known as Abu Omar, a radical Muslim cleric living in Milan and under investigation by the Italian authorities on suspicion of involvement in Islamist terrorism.
His disappearance, in February 2003, caused an inquiry that attracted worldwide attention last month when a Milan judge ordered the arrest of 13 American secret service agents accused of the cleric's abduction.

Details from the inquiry have provided a unique glimpse of the way in which the CIA seizes its foes abroad. The prosecutors in charge of the inquiry claim that Abu Omar was the target of what the US terms an "extraordinary rendition", the seizure of a suspect by agents for dispatch to a third country, often one in which torture is common.

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