Reuters
ROME: A magistrate is investigating whether Italian officials helped CIA agents abduct a terrorism suspect who says he was flown from Milan to Egypt and tortured, Interior Minister Giuliano Amato said on Monday. An Italian court has issued arrest warrants for 22 suspected U.S. agents accused of kidnapping Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, also known as Abu Omar, from a Milan street in 2003 and flying him to Egypt. Milan prosecutor Armando Spataro had previously said there was no evidence that Italians helped in the alleged abduction. But Amato told Reuters in an interview that the prosecutor was continuing his investigation. I don t exclude that eventually, not only the American agents might be involved in that matter, Amato said. What the prosecutor in Milan is trying to understand is whether Italian officials were also involved in this matter. Spataro could not be reached for comment. A report by a Council of Europe investigator last month said the Nasr case was one in a global spider s web of secret CIA flights of terrorist suspects. Italy s former center-right government, which lost power in April elections, denied any role in the abduction. But the Council of Europe s investigator, Dick Marty, said It is unlikely that the Italian authorities were not aware of this large-scale CIA operation. Washington has acknowledged making secret rendition transfers of terrorism suspects between countries, but denies using torture or handing suspects over to countries that do so. Italian investigators had been wiretapping Nasr before his abduction and accused him of having ties to al Qaeda. In documents pre-dating media reports of a possible Italian police role in the abduction, prosecutors had maintained it was carried out solely by American agents. Amato said he had no information on reports that an Italian policeman had confessed to taking part in the kidnapping. But he said any conclusion by magistrates that Italy helped abduct Nasr could have consequences for a court extradition request, which the previous center-right administration had refused to forward to Washington. Should Italian officials be involved, it wouldn t be any more a unilateral U.S. operation. This would change the legal basis of everything, Amato said. -Additional reporting by Nelson Graves and Massimiliano Di Giorgio
