Europeans Investigate CIA Role in Abductions

Although Swedish authorities had secretly invited the CIA to assist in the operation, the disclosures prompted the director of Sweden's security police last week to promise that his agency would never let foreign agents take charge of such a case again.

"In the future we will use Swedish laws, Swedish measures of force and Swedish military aviation when deporting terrorists," Klas Bergenstrand, the security police chief, told reporters. "That way we get full control over the whole situation."

Clues to a Mystery

In Milan, the Egyptian-born cleric attracted the attention of counterterrorism police soon after arriving in Italy in 1997 from Albania. Known as Abu Omar, his full name was Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr. He was 42, a veteran fighter from the wars in Bosnia and Afghanistan and a wanted man in Egypt, where authorities had charged him with belonging to an outlawed Islamic radical group.

Nasr frequently preached at two mosques in Milan that have long attracted religious and political extremists, according to Italian and U.S. officials. One of the mosques, a converted garage on Viale Jenner, is classified as a financier of terrorism causes by the U.S. Treasury Department, which has accused it of supporting "the movement of weapons, men and money around the world."

Nasr reinforced the mosque's reputation by preaching angrily against the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan and handing out vitriolic pamphlets criticizing U.S. policy in the Middle East. Italian counterterrorism police tapped his home telephone and kept him under surveillance.

"He was the kind of person who, let's put it this way, did not speak diplomatically," said Abdelhamid Shaari, president of the Islamic Cultural Center at Viale Jenner, who denies that either the mosque or the center sponsor terrorism or illegal activity. "When he attacked America, he did not speak in half-measures. He got right to the point."

When Nasr vanished, his family and mosque leaders reported it as a kidnapping, after a witness said she saw the abduction. The witness, a recent immigrant, said she was scared to repeat her story to the police, however, leading some investigators to speculate that Nasr had disappeared on his own and gone to Iraq to fight U.S. forces.

Italian police opened a missing person investigation, but the case stalled for more than a year. That changed in April 2004, when Nasr's wife unexpectedly received a telephone call from her husband. He told her he had been kidnapped and taken to a U.S. air base in Italy. He said he was then flown to another U.S. base, before being taken to Cairo.

The call was recorded by Italian police, who had kept the wiretap on Nasr's home telephone in place. Although transcripts have not been made public, Nasr's colleagues at the mosque said he reported that he had been tortured and kept naked in subfreezing temperatures in a prison in Cairo.

During the phone call, Nasr told his wife that he had been let out of prison in Egypt but remained under house arrest. His relatives have said they believe he was imprisoned again shortly afterward when news of the recorded conversation was reported by Italian newspapers.

The existence of the wiretap is revealed in sealed Italian court papers reviewed by The Washington Post. The documents, dated in the spring of 2004, include a judge's authorization to continue the wiretap and show that investigators were pursuing the theory that covert agents -- possibly from the United States, Italy or Egypt -- were behind the kidnapping.

Italian investigators have since determined that 15 agents, some of them CIA operatives, were involved in Nasr's abduction, according to reports in Corriere della Sera, a leading Italian daily. Investigators were able to trace calls made by the agents by linking calls made by the same phones near the mosque and Aviano Air Base on the day Nasr vanished, the newspaper reported.