Doug Stanglin

USA TODAY

A former CIA officer says Portugal's top court rejected her final appeal and she will be extradited to Italy to serve a prison sentence for her alleged role in the CIA kidnapping of an Egyptian cleric in 2003 under a U.S. extraordinary renditions program.

Sabrina de Sousa told the Associated Press by email Wednesday that she was waiting to be told when she would be taken to Italy, where she was convicted in absentia in 2009 and faces a four-year sentence.

In a related move, the European Parliament on Wednesday expressed serious concerns for what it said was "apathy" shown by some member states and EU institutions over recognizing "the multiple fundamental rights violations and torture" that took place in CIA “rendition” operations on European soil between 2001 and 2006.

Under the U.S. rendition program, instituted after the 9/11 attacks, terror suspects were kidnapped and transferred to centers in various countries where they were interrogated and tortured. President Obama later ended the program, which also came under Congressional scrutiny.

At issue in the de Sousa case is the 2003 kidnapping of Egyptian cleric Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr, also known as Abu Omar, from a Milan street in a highly choreographed CIA operation.

The radical cleric, who lived in Milan, was part of an Islamic opposition group wanted by Egyptian authorities for his involvement in Jemaah Islamiah, a network of Islamic extremists that sought to overthrow the government in the 1990s, according to The Washington Post. After the snatch in broad daylight, he was transferred to U.S. military bases in Italy and Germany before being moved to Egypt, where he says he was tortured. He was held for a year and released in 2004.

De Sousa was among 26 Americans convicted in absentia for their alleged role in the operation. None of the defendants, who fled the country, has been in Italian custody.

Those convicted include the former Milan CIA station chief, Robert Seldon Lady, whose original seven-year sentence was increased to nine years on appeal. The other Americans, all but one identified by prosecutors as CIA officers or operatives, also saw their sentences stiffened on appeal, from five to seven years.

De Sousa, who was working in Italy under diplomatic cover as a CIA officer, insists she was not involved in the abduction. She also argued she could not use confidential U.S. government information to defend herself.

Portugal's constitutional court said in a ruling posted on its website late Tuesday that it rejected her appeal on the issue of extradition. The court will send its decision back to the lower court, which will inform the police and start the extradition process.

De Sousa, a naturalized U.S. citizen from India, told the AP she had "no idea" when she might be sent to Italy. In an interview with Newsweek in 2012, De Sousa expressed bitterness over her legal situation, which kept her under virtual house arrest in the U.S.

"The people responsible (for Abu Omar’s kidnapping) are sitting on corporate boards and living comfortable lives, traveling," she said of the senior CIA officials who planned the abduction. She said at the time she missed her mother and other relatives who live in the former Portuguese colony of Goa, India.

Risking arrest on international warrants, De Sousa was in Portugal on a trip to visit her relatives when she was detained at Lisbon airport.

De Sousa's Italian lawyer previously said he is hopeful of obtaining clemency from Italy’s head of state in the case, which also implicated Italy’s secret services and proved embarrassing to successive Italian governments. President Sergio Mattarella granted clemency to other defendants convicted in the case.

De Sousa said she sent a letter to Pope Francis on Wednesday through the Vatican’s embassy in Lisbon urging him to speak out against the extraordinary renditions used by the CIA after the 9/11 attacks, the AP reported. The pontiff already condemned the practice in a 2014 speech.

The convictions in Italy after a three-and-a-half-year trial were the first involving the CIA program.

The resolution by the European Parliament called for more fact-finding missions to members countries, like Lithuania, Poland, Italy and Britain, identified as "complicit" in the CIA's detention and interrogation program,

The parliament said it regretted that more than a year after the release of a U.S. Senate study of the renditions program, "no perpetrators have been held to account and the U.S. government has failed to cooperate with EU member states."