CIA methods exposed by kidnap inquiry

The article below is about what Italy learned of the CIA practices around the recently protested kidnap. However in another separate small article we also find the following: The radical Egyptian cleric allegedly kidnapped from Italy by the CIA once provided the American spy agency with valuable information about Islamic militants in Albania, according to a published report. The Chicago Tribune, citing the former second-ranking official of the Albanian intelligence service, reported in its Sunday editions that Moustafa Hassan Nasr, also known as Abu Omar, was a valuable source of information in the mid-1990s to the CIA about the close-knit community of Islamic fundamentalists living in exile in Albania, a formerly communist country in the Balkans. Astrit Nasufi, the former Albanian intelligence officer, told the newspaper that the imam had been considered a credible source of information.

“I was walking down Via Guerzoni with my little girl and I saw a man with a long beard and a djellaba being stopped by two westerners with a mobile telephone. They were asking him, in Italian, for his documents, the way the police do,” the witness said.

“At the junction with Via Croce Viola there was a pale-coloured van on the pavement,” she continued. “Then, all I heard was a loud noise like a thud. The van suddenly shot backwards and then set off again, away from the mosque, passing me at high speed. And the three people I’d seen, they weren’t there any longer.”

One of them was Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, otherwise known as Abu Omar, a radical Muslim cleric living in Milan and under investigation by the Italian authorities on suspicion of involvement in Islamist terrorism.

His disappearance, in February 2003, caused an inquiry that attracted worldwide attention last month when a Milan judge ordered the arrest of 13 American secret service agents accused of the cleric’s abduction.

Details from the inquiry have provided a unique glimpse of the way in which the CIA seizes its foes abroad. The prosecutors in charge of the inquiry claim that Abu Omar was…

Posted by Ryz
Born and raised in The Netherlands and living in Canada since 2000. Spent most of his professional career in the IT industry for corporations. Now self-employed. Loves music, graphics, science, politics and various other things that happen to pass in...

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