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Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr

Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr

al-Qaeda

Home Front: WoT

20051214

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Europe

Ex-CIA agent convicted over imam kidnapping to face sentencing

2017-07-01

[IsraelTimes] Sabrina de Sousa hopes to avoid serving prison time for 2003 abduction of Abu Omar authorized by US and Italia. A former CIA agent who was found guilty of kidnapping an Egyptia holy man by an Italian court more than a decade ago said Thursday she intended to return to Italia to face her sentence, but hopes to avoid prison. Sabrina de Sousa, who holds dual American and Portuguese nationality, said she would leave Portugal to face the Italian courts over the abduction of radical preacher Abu Omar ...whose mother knew him as Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr. He was involved with Ansar al-Islam, a Kurdish Islamic group in northern Iraq that the United States said had ties with Saddam Hussein's regime, the Taliban, and Al Qaeda. In 2013 Italy reactivated the case against him in absentia. At the time it did not seem likely Egypt would give up its native son to serve his sentence... from a Milan street in 2003 in an operation allegedly led jointly by the CIA and the Italian intelligence services. She has already gone on trial in absentia along with 22 others in what were the first legal convictions in the world against people involved in the CIA’s extraordinary renditions program that followed the September 11, 2001 attacks. "I’m going back to Italia next week to serve a sentence that will be determined by the Italian courts," 60-year-old de Sousa told AFP, saying she hoped to be released on parole and carry out community service. At the end of February, Italian President Sergio Mattarella granted her "a partial pardon of one year’s imprisonment," reducing her jail time to three years of a lenient form of sentence that does not necessarily need to be served behind bars and allows the convict to work. Italia then withdrew the European arrest warrant issued after her arrest in October 2015 at Lisbon airport. In an email sent from the US where she was preparing to have surgery, de Sousa said she would like to do her community service in Portugal but added that "even if I could... I would have reason to be very concerned about what would happen to me." "Portugal after all threw me in prison for 10 days with no plausible reason for doing so." Omar was kidnapped on February 17, 2003, before being transferred to Egypt where his lawyers say he was tortured, in a case that highlighted the controversial secret renditions of suspected turbans by the United States and its allies. "This operation was approved by the highest levels of the US government," said de Sousa. "What US officials in Washington and some in the Italian Government were told was that Abu Omar was a dangerous terrorist; and with that justification the CIA chief in Rome obtained the necessary approvals," she added. "This obviously turned out not to be the case and Abu Omar was released from an Egyptian prison. As with most cover-ups lower level officers like myself end up paying the price for decisions for which we had no input."

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Home Front: WoT

Ex-CIA agent loses fight against extradition to Italy

2016-06-08

A former CIA agent said Wednesday she will be extradited to Italy to serve a prison sentence for her part in the U.S. extraordinary renditions program after Portugal's Constitutional Court rejected her final appeal. Sabrina de Sousa told the Associated Press she is waiting to be told when she will be taken to Italy, where she was convicted in absentia and has a four-year sentence to serve. Since her October arrest in Lisbon on a European arrest warrant, De Sousa has lost her extradition fight at a lower Lisbon court and her appeal of that decision to the Portuguese Supreme Court. De Sousa was among 26 Americans convicted in the kidnapping of terror suspect Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr, also known as Abu Omar, from a Milan street on Feb. 17, 2003. She insists that she wasn't involved in the abduction. The Constitutional Court said in a ruling posted on its website late Tuesday that De Sousa's appeal was rejected. Under Portuguese legal procedure, the Constitutional Court now sends its decision back to the lower court. That court then informs the police, who set in motion the extradition process in conjunction with Italian authorities. De Sousa said in an email to the AP that she had "no idea" when she might be sent to Italy. Her Italian lawyer has previously said he is hopeful of obtaining clemency from Italy's head of state in the case, which has also implicated Italy's secret services and proved embarrassing to successive Italian governments. President Sergio Mattarella has granted clemency to other defendants convicted in the case. De Sousa said she sent a letter to Pope Francis on Wednesday, through the Vatican's embassy in Lisbon, urging him to speak out against the extraordinary renditions used by the CIA after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The pontiff has already condemned the practice, in a 2014 speech. De Sousa, who has U.S. and Portuguese citizenship and was working in Italy under diplomatic cover, argues that she was never officially informed of the Italian court conviction and couldn't use confidential U.S. government information to defend herself. "I was never notified nor was I allowed to defend myself because of secrecy obligations," she wrote in the letter to the pope. "The absence of due process and the imposition of various versions of state secrets are obstacles that prevent the many unanswered questions about the premise and justification for Abu Omar's rendition." The rendition program, under which terror suspects were kidnapped and transferred to centers where they were interrogated and tortured, was part of the anti-terrorism strategy of the U.S. administration following the attacks. President Obama ended the program years later.

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Europe

Italy reactivates case against kidnapped Egyptian imam

2013-11-23

[Al Ahram] An Egyptian cleric kidnapped from Milan in 2003 as part of the CIA's extraordinary renditions program is facing trial in absentia in Italy on terrorism charges stemming from a decade-old investigation. Prosecutors on Friday requested a prison sentence of six years and eight months for Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr, known as Abu Omar, who is in Egypt and unlikely to be handed over if convicted. A verdict is expected next month in the closed-door fast-track trial, which included only one day of evidence on Friday. Italy was investigating the former Milan imam when he was kidnapped from a Milan street on Feb. 17, 2003.

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Europe

Italian judge convicts 23 Americans in CIA kidnap case

2009-11-05

In abstentia, of course. If we didn't have the gutless, clueless Bambi as president, I'd suggest calling the Italian ambassador in and asking him to explain why this happened, and how he's going to persuade his government to reverse it, or else explain to his government why we sent him and his entire embassy staff home. MILAN (AP) -- An Italian judge found 23 Americans and two Italians guilty Wednesday in the kidnapping of an Egyptian terror suspect, delivering the first legal convictions anywhere in the world against people supposedly involved in the CIA's extraordinary renditions program. Classic show trial missing only a groveling defendant ... Human rights groups hailed the decision and pressed President Barack Obama to repudiate the Bush administration's practice of abducting terror suspects and transferring them to third countries where torture was permitted. The American Civil Liberties Union said the verdicts were the first convictions stemming from the rendition program. The Obama administration ended the CIA's interrogation program and shuttered its secret overseas jails in January but has opted to continue the practice of extraordinary renditions. The Americans, who were tried in absentia, now cannot travel to Europe without risking arrest as long as the verdicts remains in place. That might not be a punishment. One of those convicted, former Milan consular official Sabrina De Sousa, accused Congress of turning a blind eye to the entire matter. "No one has investigated the fact that the U.S. government allegedly conducted a rendition of an individual who now walks free and the operation of which was so bungled," she said, speaking through her lawyer Mark Zaid. Despite the convictions capping the nearly three-year Italian trial, several Italian and American defendants - including the two alleged masterminds of the abduction - were acquitted due to either diplomatic immunity or because classified information was stricken by Italy's highest court. The case has been politically charged from the beginning, with attempts to mislead investigators looking into the cleric's disappearance and derail the judicial proceedings once the trial was under way. But the Italian-American relationship, conditioned on such issues as participation in the Afghan campaign, is unlikely to be hurt by the convictions. Pity, it should be. Three Americans were acquitted, including the then-Rome CIA station chief Jeffrey Castelli and two other diplomats formerly assigned to the Rome Embassy, as well as the former head of Italian military intelligence Nicolo Pollari and four other Italian secret service agents. Only two Italians were in the courtroom to hear the verdict, including Marco Mancini, the former No. 2 at Italian military intelligence, who embraced his lawyer outside the courtroom after he was acquitted. Former Milan CIA station chief Robert Seldon Lady received the top sentence of eight years in prison. The other 22 convicted American defendants, including De Sousa and Air Force Lt. Col. Joseph Romano, each received a five-year sentence. Two Italians got three years each as accessories. U.S. State Department spokesman Ian Kelly said the Obama administration was "disappointed about the verdicts." You shouldn't be 'disappointed', you should be hopping mad. The State Department is being sued by De Sousa, a former State Department employee who denies she was a CIA agent and who believes she should have been granted diplomatic immunity by U.S. officials. The judge's verdict, however, did not extend diplomatic immunity to consular officials charged. Zaid, De Sousa's American lawyer, told The Associated Press in Washington: "The Italian conviction merely confirms the U.S. government's betrayal of our diplomatic and military representatives overseas." No, it demonstrates Italian perfidy ... Romano, who was one of only two Americans who received permission to hire his own lawyer, had tried to have the jurisdiction moved to a U.S. military court in the last weeks of the trial. "We are clearly disappointed by the court's ruling," Defense Department press secretary Geoff Morrell told a Pentagon press conference Wednesday. The Americans, all but one identified by prosecutors as CIA agents, were tried in absentia as subsequent Italian governments refused or ignored prosecutors' extradition request - a position that casts doubts on the Italian government's political will to enforce the sentences. But it won't stop some goof-ball lefty lawyer from swearing out warrants, calling Interpol, and in general being a nuisance, to wit: Prosecutor Armando Spataro said he was considering asking Rome to issue international arrest warrants for the fugitive Americans on the strength of the convictions. The government of Silvio Berlusconi, a close ally of President George W. Bush, has previously refused. What happens if the Berlusconi government falls? Italy isn't exactly the model of political stability ... The Americans and Italian agents were accused of kidnapping Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr, also known as Abu Omar, on Feb. 17, 2003, in Milan, then transferring him to U.S. bases in Italy and Germany. He was then moved to Egypt, where he says he was tortured. He has since been released, but has not been permitted to leave Egypt to attend the trial. Spataro had sought stiffer sentences ranging from 10 to 13 years in jail, citing a conspiracy between U.S. and Italian secret services to abduct Nasr, who was under surveillance by Italian investigators building their own terror case against him. Nasr was suspected of organizing the movement of would-be suicide bombers to the Middle East, and Spataro noted in his closing arguments that the timing of his CIA-led abduction, as the United States was preparing to invade Iraq, indicated his potential importance. So we say that Nasr is a bad boy. The Italians haven't contradicted that. He was operating on Italian soil, so -- supposedly -- our CIA and the Italian secret police pinched him, popped him, whacked him, and shipped him. And I'm supposed to be unhappy about any of this? CIA Director Leon Panetta said at his confirmation hearing in February that the administration would continue the practice of rendition for prisoners captured in the war on terrorism, but promised to get assurances first that prisoners would not be tortured or have their human rights violated once transferred. Then what's the point of rendition? The whole idea is to get Nasr and his buddies to understand that it's in their interest to talk to the American interrogator holding a cup of coffee instead of the Egyptian interrogator holding a truncheon ... The CIA declined to comment on the convictions. Ken Anderson at the Volokh Conspiracy describes the motivation and implications behind this show trial. Take a look.

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Europe

CIA Flights: Muslim Cleric Says He Was Kidnapped, Tortured By Italians

2006-11-10

A Muslim cleric allegedly abducted by CIA agents in Milan in 2003 says in a document presented to Italian prosecutors that Italian agents participated in the operation and tortured him. In the document, which was obtained by Italy's largest circulation paper Corriere della Sera and published on Thursday, Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr, also known as Abu Omar, says two of the kidnappers were "very Italian." He thus contradicts claims by Italian military intelligence chief Nicolo Pollari that Italy knew nothing of the plan and that the operation was possibly the fake abduction of an informer. In his diary of the abduction, Abu Omar recollects how he was seized by agents as he was walking in a street in Italy's financial capital and forced to get inside a van, where he claims two Italian agents had to carry out a chest massage after he was so badly beaten. "I heard the two Italians discuss and one of the two was screaming," Abu Omar writes. "They tore away my clothes and performed a chest massage." The cleric then claims that he was taken to an airport and transported to Egypt where he was questioned and repeatedly tortured. "The first time that (Egyptian officials) tortured me, they swore against me and Italy, saying that it had given me political asylum. They told me: Italy handed you over to Egypt and no one has come from Italy to free you from these tortures."

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Europe

Italians Arrest 2 Italian Agents, Seeking Arrest of 3 CIA Agents

2006-07-05

Prosecutors said Wednesday they had arrested two Italian intelligence officers and were seeking four more Americans as part of an investigation into the alleged CIA kidnapping of an Egyptian cleric in Milan in 2003. The arrest of the two SISMI intelligence officials was the first official acknowledgment that Italian agents were involved in a case that prosecutors have called a clear violation of Italian sovereignty. In a statement released in Milan, prosecutors said three Americans being sought were CIA agents, while the fourth worked at the joint U.S.-Italian air base of Aviano, where the Egyptian was allegedly taken after his abduction. The statement did not provide names, but said the two Italians, at the time of the kidnapping, were the director of SISMI's first division — dealing with international terrorism — and the head of the agency's operations in northern Italy. Italian media reports identified the two as Marco Mancini, currently the head of military counterespionage, and Gustavo Pignero, and said they were charged with kidnapping. Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr, an Egyptian cleric and terrorist suspect also known as Abu Omar, was allegedly kidnapped from a Milan street on Feb. 17, 2003. Prosecutors say the operation represented a severe breach of Italian sovereignty that compromised their anti-terrorism efforts, and have already incriminated 22 purported CIA agents. Prosecutors say Nasr was taken by the CIA to a joint U.S.-Italian air base, flown to Germany and then to Egypt, where he says he was tortured. The operation was believed part of a CIA program known as "extraordinary rendition" in which terrorism suspects are transferred to third countries. Prosecutors and a lawyer for Nasr say he is being held in a Cairo prison. Italian media reports in recent months have said that Italian intelligence officers were also involved. But former Premier Silvio Berlusconi maintained his government and Italian secret services had not taken part in the operation or been informed. In March, SISMI director Nicolo Pollari told EU lawmakers that Italian agents had no knowledge of the operation. Nasr is believed to have fought in Afghanistan and Bosnia and was under surveillance on suspicion of recruiting Islamic militants, according to Italian media reports. Both SISMI and Milan prosecutor Armando Spataro, who has been leading the probe, declined comment. Spataro is seeking the extradition of the 22 purported CIA agents accused in Nasr's abduction. The previous government led by Berlusconi decided against forwarding Spataro's extradition request to Washington, but Spataro has said he would ask the new center-left government led by Romano Prodi to make the request. Also as part of the investigation, the Milan offices of an Italian daily, Libero, were searched Wednesday by about a dozen police, who seized the computer of the newspaper's deputy editor, Renato Farina. Farina has covered the case, and the newspaper said police were looking for information they thought had been leaked by the SISMI to the journalist. In Italy and across Europe, leftist politicians accused the Berlusconi government, a U.S. ally, of complicity with the CIA, while conservatives defended the officials involved and criticized prosecutors for hurting the fight against terrorism. European investigator Dick Marty, a Swiss senator, reported to Europe's top human rights body last month that 14 European countries, including Italy, had aided the movement of detainees who said they were abducted by U.S. agents and secretly transferred to prisons around the world. "Today's arrest leaves this complicity beyond doubt," said a statement from Cem Ozdemir and Raul Romeva, two Green members of the European Parliament. "This arrest is only the tip of the iceberg." But Jas Gawronski, an Italian member of the European Parliament on a committee investigating CIA activities, condemned the move by prosecutors. "Osama bin Laden is happy," said Gawronski, a former Berlusconi spokesman. "In my country today, instead of arresting terrorists we're arresting those who are hunting terrorists."

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Home Front: WoT

Investigator: US Shipped Out Detainees...Really....I Think....

2005-12-14

EFL... Dick Marty, a Swiss senator looking into claims the CIA operated secret prisons in Europe, said an ongoing, monthlong investigation unearthed "clues" that Poland and Romania were implicated — perhaps unwittingly. "To my knowledge, those detainees were moved about a month ago, maybe a little more," he told reporters after briefing the legal committee of the Council of Europe, a human rights watchdog, on his findings. "They were moved to North Africa." Asked by The Associated Press on the sidelines of the meeting to which North African country detainees might have been moved, he said: "I would imagine that it would be Morocco — up to you to confirm it." Apparently that's Swiss-politico speak for "I just pulled this outta my ass." Moroccan government spokesman Nabil Benabdellah denied any connection to such prisons when reports of the transfers surfaced last week. "We have nothing to do with and we have no knowledge about this subject," he told the AP. "So piss off. Y'bother me, infidel!" The investigator told reporters he could not offer proof that secret detention centers existed. Didn't stop him from having a press conference, though. Is there an election coming up in Helvetia? But he cited two suspected cases of detainees held by U.S. authorities in Europe as signs that suspects were held at least temporarily in Europe. The cases cited were the alleged February 2003 kidnapping of Egyptian cleric Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr by the CIA in Milan, Italy; and claims by Khaled al-Masri, a Lebanese-born German, that the agency took him to Afghanistan and tortured him after mistakenly identifying him as being linked to al-Qaida. Al-Masri said he was released in Albania in May 2004. Albania? I'd be annoyed if they dropped me off there, too. Marty told reporters that his aim was not to expose any U.S. wrongdoing but to ensure that he gets his 15 minutes too, dammit! the Council of Europe's 46 member states did not violate its rules. Marty has asked for air traffic logs from European countries as he seeks to trace flight patterns for several dozen suspected CIA airplanes. He also has asked for satellite images of the Sczytno-Szymany airport in northeastern Poland and the Mihail Kogalniceanu Air Base in Romania. "And a pony, too!" Marty said some governments may not have known of detention centers on their own soil and it was "still too early to assert that there had been any involvement or complicity of member states in illegal actions." Yet not too early to start throwing around accusations before he has any real proof of anything.... The senator also was critical of the United States, saying he "deplores the fact that no information or explanations" were provided by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who faced repeated questions about the CIA prison allegations on her recent visit to Europe. Ask her about stuff involving the diplomatic corps, idjits. That's her responsibility, not the spies. Rice has said the United States acts within the law and argued that Europeans are safer because of tough U.S. tactics, but she refused to discuss intelligence operations or address questions about clandestine CIA detention centers.

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Europe

CIA agents sought over 'abduction'

2005-10-01

ARREST warrants have been issued in Italy for three further alleged CIA agents accused of the “illegal abduction” of an Egyptian Muslim cleric from Milan two years ago. In June, prosecutors ordered the arrest of 19 people allegedly involved in the kidnap of Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr, known as Abu Omar, in Milan in February 2003. Police said he was flown via the US airbase at Aviano in northern Italy to the US base at Ramstein in Germany and from there to Egypt. Rome acknowledges that Abu Omar was being investigated by Italian police as a terrorist suspect. But they say his abduction was “a serious violation of Italian sovereignty” and disrupted its own investigations. Abu Omar phoned his wife in Milan from Cairo in July 2004 when briefly released, and told her that he had been tortured. He was rearrested but has not yet been charged. Following the playbook, is he? Armando Spataro, the Milan prosecutor, said the three CIA agents now being sought included a female US diplomat who he said had been in charge of the operation and “participated in it personally”. Italian newspapers named her as Betnie Medero, 38, who arrived in Italy in August 2001 as a second secretary at the US Embassy. The reports said she was now working in Mexico. And she has diplomatic immunity. All 22 agents being sought are said to have left Italy, and Signor Spataro said that he was seeking their extradition. Corriere della Sera, quoting investigators, said that material found on the computer of Robert Seldon Lady, the alleged CIA station chief in Milan at the time, included surveillance photographs of Abu Omar. Investigators said that they had tracked down the alleged agents through mobile telephone and credit card records. Idiots, idiots, idiots. Who in the world is teaching tradecraft at the Farm these days? The agents were said to have been part of the CIA’s “extraordinary rendition” programme, under which terrorism suspects are transferred to third countries without court approval. The US Embassy in Rome would not comment yesterday.

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Europe

CIA target tied to Iraq

2005-06-27

The radical Islamic preacher who Italian prosecutors say was abducted by CIA agents in February 2003 had been involved in preparing false passports and travel documents for radical Islamic fighters traveling to northern Iraq, according to an Italian law enforcement official involved in the case. The official said Italian investigators believe that the preacher, identified by prosecutors as Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr, was involved with Ansar al-Islam, a Kurdish Islamic group in northern Iraq that the United States said had ties with Saddam Hussein's regime, the Taliban, and Al Qaeda. The alleged Iraq link offers a possible explanation for why the CIA would covertly abduct a terrorism suspect in Italy, a US ally that had been cooperating closely on terrorism operations and on Nasr's case. According to court documents, 13 CIA operatives snatched Nasr, also known as Abu Omar, off the streets of Milan on Feb. 17, 2003, a month before the United States invaded Iraq. The alleged abduction, without the consent of Italian agents, has outraged Italian law enforcement officials, who had been monitoring Nasr as part of their own counterterrorism operation. Italian prosecutors are seeking the arrest of the operatives in a case that could damage US-Italian relations. A court document filed in Milan and obtained by the Globe names the 13 suspected CIA operatives, and lists dates and places of birth, credit card numbers, and American addresses. It is not clear whether the identities are real. The document also lists the names of six other Americans who had been in Italy and are accused of assisting in the operation but have not been charged. Separately, the document alleges that Lieutenant Colonel Joseph L. Romano III, then a US commander at the Aviano Air Base in Italy, allowed the base to be used for Nasr's transfer. Romano also has not been charged. Italian officials say the Egyptian-born Nasr had been suspected of terrorist activity since he received political asylum in Italy in 2001. ''He was involved in an organization that sent people to training camps in Kurdistan," said the Italian law enforcement official, who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the case. ''He was involved in preparing false documents and passports for sending people in Iraq, [perhaps] to train for bomb attacks." The official said Italian investigators have seen no evidence to indicate that Nasr was involved with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq who has claimed responsibility for some of the deadliest terrorist acts there. Reporters, human rights groups, and State Department officials once associated Zarqawi with Ansar al-Islam. Since 2001, Italy's special counterterrorism police, DIGOS, had bugged Nasr's home and mosque and had been listening in on his conversations with suspected militants in an attempt to understand his network. Their investigation ended when he abruptly disappeared in 2003. Italian police, who had suspected CIA involvement in Nasr's disappearance, only discovered what had really happened to him a year later, when he called his wife in Milan from Cairo to say that he had been kidnapped, sent to Egypt, and tortured so badly there during questioning that he had become deaf in one ear, according to a statement released by prosecutors Friday and to the law enforcement official. ''The logical question is, why didn't the CIA coordinate with the Italians and let them know what was going on?" said Andrew Krepinevich, executive director at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a Washington-based defense think-tank. Krepinevich said the bulk of the CIA's efforts in the run-up to the Iraq war focused on pinpointing the location of Saddam Hussein and the location of weapons of mass destruction, and not capturing mullahs who had been providing false travel documents to jihad fighters. ''It seems like awfully small potatoes to go after this guy at the risk of alienating what has turned out to be one of our closest allies in the Iraq war," he said. From their previous surveillance of Nasr, Italian investigators had been reaping a wealth of information about recruitment of jihadi fighters across Europe. According to excerpts from the transcript published last year in The Observer newspaper in London, Nasr and a visitor were overheard discussing the need for ''intelligent and highly educated people" for a jihad operation. The two talked in great detail about support for jihad in Saudi Arabia, Poland, Bulgaria, Austria, and Britain, and referred to London as ''the nerve center" of their network, according to the newspaper. ''The thread begins in Saudi Arabia," the visitor is quoted as saying during that meeting in Nasr's Via Quaranta mosque on June 15, 2002. ''Don't ever worry about money, because Saudi Arabia's money is your money." The visitor also told Nasr that Eastern Europe is a good place for operations because ''there aren't too many eyes," according to the transcript quoted in the Observer. The visitor also praised a man named Sheik Abd al-Aziz in Poland, saying, ''His organization is stunning." The Italian law enforcement official did not detail what evidence links Nasr to Ansar al-Islam, a group of Muslim fundamentalists that came together in northern Iraq in September 2001. According to Human Rights Watch, the group imposed a Taliban-style ban on music and Western dress in the areas that had come under its control. The State Department classifies the group as a terrorist organization. During the Iraq war, US airstrikes destroyed its base and its fighters fled to Iran to regroup, the State Department said. But yesterday, in Milan's Islamic Cultural Center, housed in a modest building in the city's bustling immigrant district, Nasr's former associates denied that his fiery speeches against the United States represented anything other than his political beliefs. ''He was a kind, normal person and in no way dangerous," said Imam Abu Imad, the center's spiritual leader. ''Maybe he spoke about Muslims having to resist injustice, but this was his opinion." Imad said that he first met Nasr in Milan in 1993 and that Nasr had been engaged in charity work among the Muslim communities in Albania. He said Nasr was born in Egypt, where he studied law, and moved to live in a run-down apartment building in Milan's Via Conte Verde in 2001, after being granted political asylum. Nasr has two children -- a son and daughter -- and a wife, Nabila, who have since left Milan for Egypt, Imad said. Nasr's wife had contacted a lawyer associated with the mosque to help find her husband. ''A few years ago a woman came to me and said her husband was missing," said Antonio Nebuloni, lawyer to the Milan Islamic Cultural Center. ''And then we found that he disappeared."

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