Italy Convicts Former CIA Agents in Renditions Trial

The
Americans were all tried in absentia after the United States refused to
extradite them. But the verdict, the first of its kind, was welcomed by
rights campaigners who have long complained the renditions policy
violated basic human rights.

Egyptian
cleric Abu Omar attends a trial over the CIA's "rendition" programme at
a Milan courthouse in 2007. Abu Omar was snatched by CIA agents from a
Milan street in 2003. An Italian judge has convicted 23 US and two
Italian secret agents for the kidnapping. (AFP/File/Giuseppe Cacace)

Judge
Oscar Magi dropped the case against three Americans, including a former
CIA Rome station chief, for the abduction of Egyptian-born cleric
Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, who was snatched off a Milan street in 2003
and flown to Egypt for interrogation.

He also acquitted the
former head of Italy's Sismi military intelligence service, Nicolo
Pollari, and his former deputy, ruling that evidence against them
violated state secrecy rules.

Magi sentenced the former head of
the CIA's Milan station, Robert Seldon Lady, to eight years in prison
and the other 22 former CIA agents to five years each.

He ruled
that those convicted should paid 1 million euros in damages to Nasr,
better known as Abu Omar, and 500,000 euros to his wife.

Abu Omar
was secretly flown from Aviano airbase in northeast Italy via Ramstein
base in Germany to Egypt, where he says he was tortured and held until
2007 without charge.

It is the first case of its kind to contest
the practice of "extraordinary rendition" under the administration of
former U.S. President George W. Bush, in which terrorism suspects were
captured in one country and taken for questioning in another, where
interrogation techniques were tougher.

(Reporting by Emilio Parodi and Daniel Flynn; writing by Daniel Flynn)