The radical Egyptian cleric who was kidnapped in Milan by the CIA in 2003 has come to the defence of a former CIA officer convicted for her alleged role in his extraordinary rendition.

Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, who is known as Abu Omar, told the Guardian in a telephone interview that he believed Sabrina De Sousa, who faces imminent extradition to Italy, was a scapegoat and ought to be pardoned by Italy’s head of state, Sergio Mattarella. De Sousa, a 60-year-old dual American and Portuguese citizen, faces a four-year prison sentence and is due to be extradited from Portugal on 4 May.

“Sabrina and the others who were convicted are scapegoats. The US administration sacrificed them. All of those higher up in the hierarchy are enjoying their immunity,” he said. “These people higher up, without doubt they should be convicted in this case. They should face trial.”

The remarks mark an extraordinary turn of events in a story that has vexed the US and Italian governments since Abu Omar’s case became public in 2005, exposing in great detail the inner workings of a highly classified and controversial Bush-era counter-terrorism programme. The case also exposed US allies’ help in conducting the secret programme. Abu Omar’s views on De Sousa were first reported by ADNKronos, a wire agency.

Abu Omar’s story began on 18 February 2003 when he was stopped on a street in Milan, grabbed from behind and pulled inside a car by CIA officers, allegedly working with the help of Italian officials. The radical cleric, who had been granted political asylum in Italy in 2001 and was already the subject of a terrorism investigation by other Italian officials, leading to his eventual conviction in absentia, was then transported to Cairo via Germany, where he was allegedly imprisoned, interrogated and tortured.

Abu Omar was stopped on a street in Milan, grabbed from behind and pulled inside a car by CIA officers. Photograph: Nasser Nasser/AP

The case was investigated by an independent prosecutor in Italy, leading to the conviction in 2009 of 22 CIA operatives and other US officials for orchestrating the kidnapping. The US officials, including De Sousa, who was publicly a state department official in Milan but actually an undercover CIA officer, were convicted in absentia as they had left Italy before the trial began. Some officials, including Italians, were later pardoned.

The US did not invoke diplomatic immunity for De Sousa or other low level officials. The story was dormant for years, largely because successive Italian governments steered clear of the issue and never sought to extradite any of the Americans involved. But that changed the moment De Sousa decided to leave the US last year and travel to Portugal to visit family. She was detained at the airport in Lisbon on her way to India because of an outstanding European arrest warrant that had been issued by law enforcement officials.

De Sousa has always said she played a minor role as a translator in an early-stage discussion of extraordinary rendition, before Abu Omar had been named as a potential target.



In the Guardian interview, Abu Omar said he was not sure whether she played a role, but that he had never seen her before.

He said: “Now she’s 60 years old. If media reports are right, she and the people who kidnapped me were the reason why I left my job in Italy, and a lot of trouble to me and my family happened because of that. They are the reason behind my physical disabilities now. The Italian prosecution actually accused her of this.”

Whatever her involvement, he added: “She’s threatened to be sentenced between four and six years, and I don’t wish that for her. I’ve been in prison before, and I don’t wish for the same to happen to her, either as a friend or a foe. Especially because she’s a woman.”

He pointed out that De Sousa had been on her way to visit her 90-year-old mother in India, and that he had been forbidden from paying respects to his own late mother after Egypt’s interior minister at the time refused to release him from jail.

“[He] refused for me to attend my own mother’s funeral, and Sabrina could be subjected to the same problem,” he said. “As a Muslim, I should wish for her to be pardoned.”



He insisted that hers was a humanitarian case, because she “exposed injustices and revealed the injustices through the media”. De Sousa has been a consistent critic of the US government and made a series of allegations in 2013, including that the former CIA station chief Jeffrey Castelli had exaggerated the threat Abu Omar posed to get approval for the rendition, and that the operation had been approved by the then CIA director George Tenet. In a recent interview with the Guardian she suggested she would willingly have discussions with Italian officials in order to defend herself.

De Sousa said in response to the Abu Omar comments that she appreciated his remarks about her family.

“Abu Omar also recognises that my imprisonment will not result in real accountability for what he went through in Egypt,” she said.

De Sousa has said she knows the US government actively lobbied Italy’s president, Mattarella, to pardon two CIA officials who were shown leniency late last year, even though they never served time in Italy.

The former CIA officer’s predicament comes at an exceedingly tricky moment for the Italian government.

“The US has been between a rock and a hard place on this for some time and now Italy is poised to wedge themselves in as well,” said Chris Jenks, director of the Criminal Justice Clinic and an assistant law professor at Southern Methodist University’s Dedman School of Law, who has followed the case. A move by Mattarella to pardon De Sousa would be politically problematic in Italy given the country’s ongoing stand-off with Egypt over the recent torture and murder of an Italian citizen, Giulio Regeni, in Cairo.

Americans, he added, were generally perceived as being unaccountable in matters of justice in Italy, from cases ranging from the 1998 Cavalese cable car disaster, when 20 people were killed after four American pilots accidentally cut a cable supporting a gondola but never faced prosecution, to the case of Amanda Knox, who was found not guilty of murder last year after a contentious murder trial.

“The Obama administration inherited this debacle and cannot publicly support what the CIA did in Milan. At the same time the US, like all countries, needs an intelligence service and President Obama doesn’t want his legacy to be as allowing the first ever extradition of a CIA agent,” Jenks said.



Underscoring the point, the conservative Wall Street Journal published an editorial this week that criticised the White House for failing to protect De Sousa, saying Washington had “abandoned one of its operatives to the political whims of foreign prosecutors” and that her case sent a “demoralising message to all who serve in the shadows, even as the war on terror enters a dangerous new phase”.

The US has refused to comment on the case. But one official told the Guardian that De Sousa had made a decision to break ties with the government when she moved to sue the US for not invoking diplomatic immunity to help her.



Jenks said it would probably never be known how the US might try to incentivise Italy’s president to “make this go away” but that Italy would probably leverage the situation to get something in return for a pardon.

The issue could feasibly be discussed as early as Friday, when the US vice-president, Joe Biden, is due to meet Italy’s prime minister, Matteo Renzi, in Rome.