A shake-up of Italy's intelligence services looked increasingly likely on Friday as indications of Italian involvement in an alleged CIA kidnapping operation in Milan three years ago continued to generate fallout.
Junior Interior Minister Marco Minniti told reporters that "a reform of the intelligence services is (now) a fundamental priority for the government".
He stressed it would have been time for an overhaul of Italy's 1977 secret services' law even without the current polemics over military intelligence service SISMI. On Wednesday, two SISMI members including the service's No.2 were arrested on charges of helping the CIA abduct Egyptian imam and terror suspect Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr who disappeared in Milan on February 17, 2003.
Four other top SISMI officials are under investigation while arrest warrants were also issued for four Americans - three CIA officers including the CIA's former Rome station chief and a former commander at the US air base at Aviano in northern Italy. None of the Americans is still in Italy.
The warrants took the number of Americans involved in the probe to 26, with Milan prosecutors unsuccessfully issuing requests last November for the extradition from the US of 22 CIA agents accused of kidnapping Nasr. SISMI has repeatedly denied any knowledge of or involvement in the case, as has the previous, Silvio Berlusconi-led government.
Interior Minister Giuliano Amato said on Wednesday that intelligence service reform would have to be addressed. But he was careful to avoid criticism of SISMI and its chief, Nicolo' Pollari. "We are not talking about Pollari here but a case which involves a few SISMI agents," Amato said.
Top centre-right opposition members took the same line.
Gaetano Pecorella, a leading member of Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italia party, said that "the (Nasr) case has nothing to do with the way SISMI is run. At most, we are dealing with the behaviour of a few individuals". "The service has worked very well under Pollari," added Pecorella, who is also Berlusconi's lawyer.
But the Italian press has increasingly focused on Pollari's possible role in the abduction operation. The papers reported that Pollari's close aide Pio Pompa was implicated in alleged SISMI efforts to manipulate press articles about the case and obtain information from certain journalists about prosecutors' investigations into it.
Corriere della Sera, Italy's biggest daily, said that wiretapped conversations between Pompa and Pollari "appear to show how the SISMI chief was kept constantly informed, in real time, of what was happening... The circle is closing and Pollari is caught in the middle".
Meanwhile, several centre-left officials accused the previous government of also knowing about the operation. Foreign Minister Massimo D'Alema said on Wednesday that "it would be difficult for operations of this sort, in which top members of the intelligence services were apparently involved, to take place without the political authorities knowing anything about it".
"The Americans have always said they never violated Italian sovereignty. Perhaps they were not entirely wrong," said the former premier. Prosecutors leading the probe say 43-year-old Nasr, who was the imam of Milan's main mosque, was snatched off the streets by a team of CIA operatives and taken to Aviano.
From there, he was allegedly flown to another US base in Germany and on to Egypt, where Nasr says he was tortured by
Egyptian security agents. Nasr, who is also known as Abu Omar, is still being held in an Egyptian prison.
Nasr's lawyer Montasser el Zeyat told ANSA on Wednesday that his client was seeking to sue the previous Italian government and the CIA over his abduction and was seeking damages of 10 million euros.
At the time of his abduction, Nasr was being probed by the Milan prosecutors for suspected links to international terrorism. Prosecutors say his abduction was a breach of national sovereignty which wrecked their investigation.
But their extradition requests were unsuccessful, with then justice minister Roberto Castelli refusing to pass them on to the US Justice Department. New Justice Minister Clemente Mastella is now under pressure to file the requests. The two SISMI members arrested on Wednesday were the first Italian officials involved in the case.
Prosecutors have also placed two journalists with right-wing daily Libero under investigation, including Libero deputy editor Renato Farina. The two are accused of aiding SISMI officials allegedly involved in the kidnapping. According to press reports, there is evidence that Farina received payments from SISMI. Prosecutors also revealed that another journalist, Giuseppe D'Avanzo of the left-leaning La Repubblica, had been illegally wiretapped and followed by SISMI agents.
La Repubblica has printed a number of explosive articles about the Nasr case including one in May which accused SISMI
of involvement. The case comes amid an international furore over allegations that the CIA has been carrying out covert
operations in Europe with the possible knowledge or consent of local governments.
The CIA has been accused of 'extraordinary rendition', the practice of secretly transporting suspects to other countries for interrogation. It is accused of running secret prisons in Eastern Europe, where aggressive interrogation techniques outlawed in the US can be used, and sending prisoners to countries like Egypt and Syria where torture is commonplace.
The US has admitted rendition practices but denies using torture or handing suspects over to countries that do so. A Council of Europe investigator reported last month that the Nasr abduction was one in a "global spider's web" of such flights. The investigator, Dick Marty, also said that it was "unlikely that the Italian authorities were not aware of this large-scale CIA operation".
