ROME - Italy’s secret service cooperated with US agents in kidnapping an Egyptian cleric, Italian press reports said Friday, despite the government of former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi denying knowledge of the abduction.The claims followed the arrest on Wednesday of two top Italian intelligence officials in connection with a judicial inquiry into the February 2003 seizure of the radical Muslim cleric Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, also known as Abu Omar, on the streets of Milan. “First confessions: SISMI was an accomplice,” the serious business daily Il Sole-24 Ore said, referring to the Italian secret military intelligence service’s alleged involvement.
The daily Corriere della Sera said “three agents (working for SISMI) acknowledged Italian complicity” in the operation blamed on the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Corriere della Sera said the three SISMI officials questioned by investigating magistrates had said the Italian intelligence service hosted several meetings at its headquarters to plan the abduction.
Marco Mancini, the second most senior director of SISMI, was arrested on Wednesday along with another top official of the agency, Gustavo Pignero, over their possible role in the abduction. The two are suspected of “complicity” in the illegal detention of the cleric, the former imam of a mosque in Milan.
| So they were the ones who approved it. Bet they're feeling like they were left out to dry. |
| "Why not just whack him, Marco?" "Nah, let the Egyptians do that. You got the papers ready?" |
Omar, who was living in asylum in Italy when he was snatched, was allegedly taken to a nearby US air base for interrogation and later transferred via Germany to Egypt, where he is still in prison. He claims to have been tortured in Egypt.
| And he'll keep claiming it given the storm he's raised so far. |
The claims threaten to stain the reputation of Berlusconi, who always insisted that the alleged abduction was carried out without his government’s knowledge. They also put in a delicate spot the new centre-left government of Romano Prodi, which must now decide how to act after criticising Berlusconi’s inaction on the matter when the left was in opposition. “The government is in deep trouble. The Americans are furious. The heads of the intelligence services are at stake,” Corriere della Sera quoted the prime minister’s secretary of state Paolo Naccarato as saying.
| Since this all proves that we can't trust the Italian government, but then we already knew that about Prodi. |
| "What's this, the artificial insemination agreement for Madonia?" "No, Minister, it's the warrants for the CIA agents." "Oh, finally, something easy!" |