CAIRO: Egypt has ordered the release of a Muslim cleric who has been held behind bars since he was kidnapped in Italy allegedly by CIA agents four years ago.
We have arranged his release, an interior ministry official who wished to remain anonymous told AFP late Sunday.
Sources close to the defense counsel for Osama Mustafa Hassan, also known as Abu Omar, said he had already left the Tora high security prison south of Cairo.
The man, a former imam of a mosque in Milan, was allegedly snatched from a street in the northern Italian city in February 2003.
Italian investigators say he was seized by agents of the US Central Intelligence Agency, with the help of Italian agents. They charge that he was then taken to a US airbase in Italy and flown to his native Egypt.
Italian prosecutors have demanded the extradition of 26 CIA agents to Italy to face trial over the case, but the country s justice minister has yet to approve the request.
Hassan s lawyer Muntasser Al-Zayat, who has claimed the imam was tortured in prison and attempted suicide, said he would sue former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.
He will file a lawsuit against Silvio Berlusconi and demand 10 million euros in damages for his involvement in the kidnapping as he was prime minister and may have authorized the CIA to capture [Hassan], he said.
Zayat also noted that Italy s new centre-left government sacked the heads of the intelligence agencies last year, in particular Nicolo Pollari as the chief of the military intelligence service Sismi.
In confessions made public in July, several Sismi officials described an active collaboration between the Italian agency and a CIA commando unit in the kidnapping.
The seizure was thought to be among scores of secret abductions of suspected militants around the world since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, in the US government s so-called extraordinary rendition program.
A Syrian-born German national, who was detained in Morocco in December 2001 in an operation involving CIA agents and handed over to the Syrian authorities two weeks later, was jailed for 12 years by a Damascus court Sunday on charges of membership of the banned Muslim Brotherhood.
Mohammed Haydar Zammar, 45, did not face prosecution on the accusations originally leveled against him of recruiting some of the Sept. 11 hijackers.
The suspected collaboration of the German and American intelligence services in his case forms part of the brief of a parliamentary inquiry currently under way in Germany.
The Italian military intelligence chief has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing in the Hassan case.
I feel like a scapegoat, a victim to sacrifice, Pollari was quoted as saying last month during a hearing into the affair.
Berlusconi has repeatedly denied awareness of the kidnapping, while the Washington Post reported in December 2005 that he approved the operation.
In addition to Pollari, five other Italians including Sismi number two Marco Mancini have been implicated in Hassan s kidnapping.
