European court of human rights censures Italy over CIA abduction case
February 24, 2016 1 Comment
Europe’s highest human rights court has ruled against Italy in the case of an Egyptian man who was abducted from Milan in 2003 by the United States Central Intelligence Agency. Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, known as Abu Omar, is a former member of al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya, an Islamist group founded in the 1970s, which aimed to overthrow the Egyptian government and replace it with an Islamic regime. Members of the group have been implicated in the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in 1981, as well as in numerous attacks on tourist facilities in Egypt in the 1990s. Once al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya was declared illegal in Egypt, Italian authorities offered Nasr political asylum, after he successfully argued that he would be subject to torture if arrested in Egypt.
But in 2003, the CIA, which believed that Nasr was involved with al-Qaeda-linked groups in Europe, abducted him from Milan in broad daylight. After his abduction, Nasr was delivered by the CIA to Egyptian authorities under Washington’s “extraordinary rendition” program. He was then imprisoned in Egypt for four years without trial. Following his release in 2008, Nasr said he was brutally tortured and raped by his Egyptian captors and was never given access to a lawyer. Regular readers of intelNews will recall that the Nasr abduction prompted international headlines after an Italian court convicted 23 Americans and two Italians for Nasr’s kidnapping. The American defendants, most of whom are believed to be CIA officers, were tried in absentia. Washington has since refused to extradite them to Italy.
On Tuesday, Italy was found guilty of human rights violations in the Nasr case by the European Court of Human Rights, the highest court of justice sanctioned by the Council of Europe. The court said that the Italian state imposed “the principle of state secrecy […] in order to ensure that those responsible [for Nasr’s abduction] did not have to answer for their actions”. Consequently, those responsible for the abduction were “ultimately […] granted immunity”, said the court, implying that the Italian executive sabotaged the Italian trial in order to allow for the alleged CIA officers to escape justice. The court also ordered Italy to pay Nasr €115,000 ($127,000) in restitution.
► Author: Joseph Fitsanakis | Date: 24 February 2016 | Permalink
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A court in Portugal has ruled to extradite a former officer of the United States Central Intelligence Agency to Italy, where she faces charges of kidnapping a man as part of a secret operation. Sabrina De Sousa, 59, was an accredited diplomat stationed at the US consulate in Milan, Italy, in 2003, when a CIA team kidnapped Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr from a Milan street in broad daylight. Nasr, who goes by the nickname Abu Omar, is a former member of Egyptian militant group al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya, and was believed by the CIA to have links to al-Qaeda. Soon after his abduction, Nasr was renditioned to Egypt, where he says he was brutally tortured, raped, and held illegally for years before being released without charge.
Forensic experts to probe alleged poisoning of Nobel Laureate poet Neruda
February 25, 2016 Leave a comment
The investigation was sparked by comments made by Neruda’s personal driver, Manuel Araya, who said that the poet had been deliberately injected with poison while receiving treatment for cancer at the Clinica Santa Maria in Chilean capital Santiago. According to Araya, General Pinochet ordered Neruda’s assassination after he was told that the poet was preparing to seek political asylum in Mexico. The Chilean dictatorship allegedly feared that Neruda would seek to form a government-in-exile and oppose the regime of General Pinochet. Last year, Spanish newspaper El País said it had been given access to a report prepared by Chile’s Ministry of the Interior, which allegedly argues that it was unlikely that Neruda’s death was the “consequence of his prostate cancer”. According to the paper, the document states that it was “manifestly possible and highly probable” that the poet’s death was the outcome of “direct intervention by third parties”. The report also explains that Neruda’s alleged murder resulted from a fast-acting substance that was injected into his body or entered it orally.
On Wednesday, it was announced that two teams of genomics and forensic experts, one in Canada and one in Denmark, will examine Neruda’s bones and teeth in an effort to extract fragments of bacterial DNA. According to reports, the experts hope that the extracted DNA will provide them with genomic data that can help identify pathogenic bacteria. That, in turn, could help establish a possible cause of death. The two teams are based at the Ancient DNA Center at McMaster University in Canada and the Department of Forensic Medicine at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark.
► Author: Joseph Fitsanakis | Date: 25 February 2016 | Permalink | News tip: R.W.
Filed under Expert news and commentary on intelligence, espionage, spies and spying Tagged with Chile, Cold War, history, News, Pablo Neruda, poisoning, Salvador Allende, suspicious deaths