Shadowland: The Road to Rendition

The agents involved in Milan, whoever they were and wherever they came from, must be cursing their luck. At first, everything went so well. The 42-year-old Abu Omar, nee Mostafa Hassan Nasr Osama, was no common immigrant, after all. His bad-guy credentials were all in order. An Islamist firebrand, he came to Italy in 1997 by way of Afghanistan and Albania. In the famously radical mosques on Via Quaranta and Viale Jenner, he was always recruiting what he called "the youth" to go blow themselves up as "martyrs" in one jihad or another, according to Italian court documents and official transcripts of taped conversations. He was the kind of Islamic preacher the United States was especially interested in after the attacks on New York and Washington in 2001 by Islamist cells originally organized among immigrants in Europe.

The Italian secret service known as DIGOS (formerly "the political police") had focused on him in the summer of 2002, when a bug they'd placed in the Via Quaranta mosque picked up a conversation he had with a visitor from Germany outlining plans to restructure a terrorist organization that's been connected to both Al Qaeda and the now-infamous Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. So even people who knew and sympathized with Abu Omar weren't sure, at first, that he hadn't decided secretly to go fight the Americans in Afghanistan--or maybe Iraq, where the war was just about to begin.

Too bad, from the kidnappers' point of view, that a woman walking out of the park on Via Guerzoni that chilly February afternoon in 2003 saw two men spray something in Abu Omar's face and bundle him into the back of a truck. Even worse, for those who wanted to hush up the whole affair, Abu Omar resurfaced--at least by telephone. On April 20, 2004, more than a year after he'd disappeared, the Italian cops listened in on a phone call he placed from Egypt to his wife in Milan, telling her he'd been in prison, but was now under a kind of house arrest; he would send her money, and she should be quiet. But Abu Omar didn't take his own advice. He called another imam in Milan and eventually recounted the tale of how he'd been abducted and where he'd been taken. Soon afterward, Abu Omar dropped out of sight again in Egypt, presumably re-imprisoned. A lawyer for the Jamaa Islamiya, an Egyptian group to which Abu Omar belonged, says he has no idea where the imam is now, whether in jail, alive or dead.

Over the last year, I've collected many hundreds of pages of court documents, warrants, official transcripts, rulings and appeals related to the various terrorist cases in Italy. Abu Omar figures in almost all of them. And in bits and pieces, more or less discreetly, the public documents confirm much of what Bonini first wrote last February, based on unnamed sources.

In a warrant issued in Milan last month by Judge Guido Salvini against a group of Tunisians suspected of terrorist connections, for instance, there is a concise description of Abu Omar's case: "It is now possible to affirm with certainty that he was kidnapped by people belonging to foreign intelligence networks interested in interrogating him and neutralizing him, to then hand him over to Egyptian authorities." Salvini writes that Italian investigators have confirmed the substance of what Abu Omar recounted in those phone calls from Egypt. In "a kidnapping that was the work of Western agents and which undoubtedly constitutes a serious violation of Italian national sovereignty," says Salvini, Abu Omar "was taken to an American base, interrogated and beaten and the next day taken on a U.S. military plane directly, with an intermediate stop, to Egypt."

Who were the agents involved? According to Bonini, they left a lot of evidence behind, including rental-car contracts, hotel bills and passport details. When Spataro issues his warrants, the names on those documents certainly will be included.