MILAN: Prosecutors on Thursday requested tougher sentences for CIA agents and Italian military intelligence officers convicted last year of abducting an Egyptian imam from the capital in 2003.
Prosecutor Piero De Petris asked that the 23 CIA agents, originally sentenced in absentia in November 2009 to up to eight years in prison, have their sentences lengthened to up to 12 years, ANSA news agency reported.
The American agents were all sentenced in absentia because the US refused to extradite them.
De Petris requested a 12-year sentence for the then-CIA chief for Italy Jeffrey Castelli as well as two other ex-agents who had benefited from diplomatic immunity at the time of the first trial.
De Petris also asked for a 12-year sentence for the then-head of Italian military intelligence SISMI, Nicolo Pollari, and 10 years for his assistant Marco Mancini.
Charges were dropped against Pollari and Mancini at the time because evidence against them violated state secrecy rules.
The case involved Washington’s "extraordinary rendition" program, which was launched in 2003 by then-US president George W. Bush and saw scores of terror suspects returned to their home countries, some of which were known to use torture.
Osama Mustafa Hassan, an imam better known as Abu Omar, was snatched from a Milan street on February 17, 2003, in an operation coordinated by the CIA and SISMI.
The radical Islamist opposition figure, who enjoyed political asylum in Italy, was allegedly taken to the Aviano Air Base, a US military installation in northeastern Italy, then flown to the US base in Ramstein, Germany, and on to Cairo, where he says he was tortured.
The imam’s suspected captors failed to take many standard precautions, notably speaking openly on cell phones, leaving investigators to suspect that the Americans had cleared their intentions with senior Italian intelligence officials.
