(ANSA) - Italy has demanded respect for its sovereignty amid a growing storm over the CIA's alleged abduction of an Islamic cleric from a Milan street two years ago.
Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi on Friday told United States Ambassador Mel Sembler that the case highlighted the "indispensable need for full respect" of Italian sovereignty, according to a statement from the premier's office.
The statement recalled "the mutual respect that has underlain the deep, close and lasting alliance" between the two countries.
Sembler said US respect was "full and total." He promised Berlusconi it would not falter in the future.
On Thursday the government denied that US authorities had given it prior knowledge of an undercover operation targeting terror suspect Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, also known as Abu Omar.
Abu Omar, the former imam of Milan's main mosque, disappeared mysteriously on February 17, 2003. At the time the Egyptian national was being probed by Milan investigators, suspected of having links to international terrorism.
Italian prosecutors say he was abducted by the CIA as part of its programme of "extraordinary rendition" in which suspected terrorists are transferred without court approval to third countries for interrogation.
Last week a Milan judge signed arrest warrants for 13 people that prosecutors say made up the CIA team which carried out the kidnapping.
"Our secret services were not aware of the operation," Carlo Giovanardi, Minister for Relations with Parliament, told the Senate, specifically denying a report in the Washington Post which claimed the contrary.
"It was never brought to the attention of the government or national institutions," he continued "Consequently it is not conceivable that any operation of this type was authorised or that Italian bodies were involved."
Giovanardi said the government intended to "take all possible measures to discover the facts" so that transgressions of national and international law could be laid bare. He stressed that this would be the case, "whoever committed them."
According to Italian investigators, Abu Omar was forced into a van in broad daylight as he walked to the Milan mosque. Either then, or some time later, he was taken to the US air base at Aviano in northern Italy, they believe.
Prosecutors also say they have found evidence of the cleric being taken to another US base, at Ramstein in Germany, before finally ending up in prison in Cairo.
He was released in April 2004 and placed under house arrest, at which point he phoned his wife in Italy and said he had been tortured. His current whereabouts are unclear although some reports say he is back in prison in Cairo.
The case of Abu Omar is not only sensitive because of its implication that the CIA ignored national sovereignty even in a country considered among its closest allies. It also risks further straining US-Italian relations when Italians are just beginning to get over the emotional upheaval of the 'friendly fire' killing of an Italian agent by American troops in Iraq earlier this year.
Nicola Calipari was shot dead by soldiers at a mobile road block as he was escorting a freed hostage to Baghdad airport on March 4. The hostage, a woman journalist, was also wounded.
In this case too, the question of who had informed who about the mission was crucial. A joint US-Italian commission set up to establish what had happened ended up producing two separate reports with US and Italian members unable to agree on responsibility.
Angered by the Abu Omar incident, the centre-left opposition said the joint Berlusconi-Sembler statement provided no answers.
"Perhaps Berlusconi and Ambassador Sembler think Italians are cretins," said Pietro Folena, foreign affairs spokesman of the largest opposition party the Democratic Left (DS).
"The head of government urges respect for sovereignty and the ambassador replies, 'That's OK, we've always done so and we'll continue to do so.' So did the Milan magistrates dream up the abduction? "Berlusconi and Sembler could have spared us this farce.
The fact is the US treats Italy like a poor relation."
DS House Whip Luciano Violante said: "The embarrassed statement on the meeting between Berlusconi and Sembler doesn't clear anything up."It poses fresh questions about a worrying incident which calls into doubt the equal dignity between friendly nations and the respect of human rights in the fight against international terrorism."
The Green Party claimed the Aviano base was tantamount to an extraterritorial holding centre like Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, where mistreatment of prisoners could be carried out without regard for Italian law. Possible reasons for a CIA operation to seize Abu Omar were examined in the latest edition of the US weekly Newsweek, which noted that the abduction came just a month before the US-led invasion of Iraq.
The CIA probably wanted to find out from the Milan imam what ties existed between Saddam Hussein and the Ansar al Islam terror group, using the information to protect US troops, the weekly said. The Chicago Tribune said that terror suspect Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, also known as Abu Omar, had been a CIA source and the abduction was an attempt to convert him back. Citing a document prepared by prosecutors, the Chicago Tribune wrote that Abu Omar was flown to Cairo on a CIA-chartered aircraft and taken immediately to the Egyptian foreign minister.
If he agreed to inform for the Egyptian intelligence service, Abu Omar "would have been set free and accompanied back to Italy," the daily reported the document as saying. Alternatively, it wrote, "Americans may have hoped the Egyptians could learn something by interrogating Abu Omar about planned resistance to the impending war on Iraq."
"Abu Omar refused to inform [...] and spent the next 14 months in an Egyptian prison facing 'terrible tortures'. After a brief release in April 2004, he was imprisoned again," said the article.
Abu Omar began cooperating with an Albanian secret services agency, described as an "an arm of the CIA" in 1995, said the daily.
After initial reluctance he became a lucrative source of information although he disappeared not long after, eventually resurfacing in Italy in 1997.
His fundamentalist sermons and active involvement in the Milanese Islamic community led to police placing him under surveillance.
According to the Chicago Tribune, prosecutors had enough grounds for Abu Omar's arrest but "the tap on his phone and the microphones hidden in his apartment and the Via Quaranta mosque made him far more valuable as a window into the comings and goings of other jihadists."
