AN EGYPTIAN preacher who was seized by the CIA in daylight on a Milan street has revealed the details of 14 months of torture to which he says he was subjected after his “extraordinary rendition” to Egypt.
Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, known as Abu Omar, described how Egyptian interrogators stripped him, shackled his arms and legs in a crucifixion position and then beat him and gave him electric shocks. He claimed they had twice attempted to rape him.
Now living in Alexandria, Nasr, 44, walks with a limp, is deaf in one ear and bears scars.
Last Friday the trial opened of 26 American defendants accused of kidnapping him on February 17, 2003, in an operation prosecutors say was coordinated by the CIA and Italian intelligence. None of the US defendants, a number of whom were identified by aliases, attended.
Nasr fled Egypt in 1988 after he was accused of being a member of Gama’a Islamiya, an Egyptian militant group that later carried out terrorist attacks. He denied the allegation and was granted political asylum in Italy. When he disappeared he was walking to midday prayers at a radical mosque where he was a part-time preacher.
He became a “ghost prisoner”, his arrest and detention confirmed to nobody. “I was out of history. My lawyer searched prisons all over Egypt and no one could find a trace of me,” he said.
Senior CIA officials have confirmed that Nasr was regarded by the US as an Al-Qaeda operative. A team from Langley, Virginia, was dispatched to Milan to snatch him and fly him to Egypt.
According to Nasr, his ordeal began in CIA hands after he was bundled into a white van and driven to Aviano air force base. He claimed he had been beaten while bound and gagged, and thought he would die.
“I was bleeding: bleeding from my face, bleeding from my knees, bleeding from other parts of my body,” he said. “My mouth started foaming.”
Throughout his 13-hour journey via Ramstein in Germany to Egypt, nobody spoke to him. The CIA agents had wrapped him in masking tape “like a mummy” that made his face bleed when it was ripped off later.
Nasr claimed that in Cairo he had been taken to a room and told he was meeting two “pashas”, important people. He was asked: “Do you want to be an informer for us? If you say yes then you can be back in Italy in 24 hours.” When Nasr said no, they sent him back to his cell.
For the first seven months, he said, he had been in the hands of Egyptian foreign intelligence, allies of the CIA. He alleged its operatives had stripped him and given him constant beatings with bare knuckles, sticks and electric cables. One method involved handcuffing his leg to his hands, so he was forced to stand for hours on the other leg, while being beaten.
On September 14, 2003, he was handed over to Egyptian state security at its interrogation compound in the Nasr City district of Cairo. For the next seven months, his treatment grew worse.
“Once I was thrown on the floor and my hands were cuffed to my back and they brought a security agent who mounted my back and slapped on top of me so as to rape me. That’s when I broke down and I started screaming till I passed out.”
In April 2004, he was released for 23 days but was told it was on condition he did not speak to the media, telephone his wife and family in Italy or talk to human rights groups.
When he broke the rules and phoned home, his calls were tapped. A tap in Italy alerted the police to his kidnapping and they began the investigation that eventually identified the CIA team. Another phone tap in Egypt resulted in his rearrest. He continued to be held without charge in prison until early this year. At no point was he charged with any offence.
Nasr’s allegations are hard to verify in detail. He has not been examined by a doctor; nor has he been brought before a court.
According to Amnesty International, which alleges 18,000 prisoners are held without trial in Egypt, his account is credible.
Hassiba Hadj Sahraoui, an Amnesty expert on Egypt who interviewed Nasr, said: “Sending him back to Egypt, knowing that Egypt practices torture on a widespread scale and knowing that Abu Omar was wanted by the intelligence services, they knew he would be tortured.”
Egypt has acknowledged receiving 60 to 70 prisoners from the US. It denies that torture is routine and says when cases are identified, those responsible are punished.
The Egyptian interior ministry said Nasr was an unreliable character. “The information we had about him was that he was, one way or the other, an individual who embraced the ideology of jihad,” it said.
The CIA and the US government refused to discuss the case and refused to cooperate with the Italian judicial inquiry.
Stephen Grey interviewed Nasr for Dispatches, Kidnapped to Order, on Channel 4 tomorrow at 8pm

by Stephen Grey
Friday June 8, 2007 The Guardian
The CIA operated secret prisons in Europe where terrorism suspects could be interrogated and were allegedly tortured, an official inquiry will conclude today.
Despite denials by their governments, senior Polish and Romanian security officials have confirmed to the Council of Europe that their countries were used to hold some of America’s most important prisoners captured after 9/11 in secret.
None of the prisoners had access to the Red Cross and many were subject to what George Bush has called the CIA’s “enhanced” interrogation, which critics have condemned as torture. Although suspicions about the secret CIA prisons have existed for more than a year, the council’s report, seen by the Guardian, appears to offer the first concrete evidence. It also details the prisons’ operations and the identities of some of the prisoners.
The council has also established that within weeks of the 9/11 attacks, Nato signed an agreement with the US that allowed civilian jets used by the CIA during its so-called extraordinary rendition programme to move across member states’ airspace. Its report states: “We have sufficient grounds to declare that the highest state authorities were aware of the CIA’s illegal activities on their territories.” The council’s investigators believe that agreement may have been illegal.
The full extent of British logistic support for the extraordinary rendition programme was first disclosed by the Guardian, which reported in September 2005 that aircraft operated by the CIA had flown in and out of UK civilian and military airports hundreds of times.
The 19-month inquiry by the council, which promotes human rights across Europe, was headed by Dick Marty, a Swiss senator and former state prosecutor. He said: “What was previously just a set of allegations is now proven: large numbers of people have been abducted from various locations across the world and transferred to countries where they have been persecuted and where it is known that torture is common practice.”
His report says there is “now enough evidence to state that secret detention facilities run by the CIA [existed] in Europe from 2003 to 2005, in particular in Poland and Romania”. Mr Marty has told Channel 4′s Dispatches, in a report to be broadcast on Monday, that the jails were run “directly and exclusively” by the CIA. This was only possible because of “collaboration at various institutional levels of America’s many partner countries”.
He succeeded in confirming details of the CIA’s prisons by using his own “intelligence methods”, which included tracking agents on both sides of the Atlantic, and persuading them to talk. Officials in Poland and Romania have repeatedly denied the existence of CIA facilities or the presence of detainees held by US authorities.
But Mr Marty concluded: “All the members and partners of Nato signed up to the same permissive – not to say illegal – terms that allowed CIA operations to permeate throughout the European continent and beyond …” There was no immediate comment from Nato.
· Stephen Grey presents Dispatches – Kidnapped to Order on Monday June 11 at 8pm on Channel 4.

Stephen Grey
Wednesday June 7, 2006The Guardian

An inquiry by Europe’s leading human rights watchdog will today name 14 countries which are involved in or complicit in the CIA’s programme of detaining terrorism suspects for transfer to countries where they may be tortured.
After a seven-month investigation, Dick Marty, chairman of the Council of Europe’s committee on legal affairs and human rights, will accuse Washington of adopting a legal approach which is “utterly alien to the European tradition” by organising the so-called extraordinary rendition of dozens of suspects.
In his report, which has been obtained by the Guardian in advance of its publication in Paris, Mr Marty accuses the UK of not only offering logistical support to the CIA operation but also providing information that was used during the torture of a terrorism suspect in Morocco.
Mr Marty, a Swiss senator and former state prosecutor, describes the involvement of the 14 European states as varying from providing staging points for CIA operations or stop-over airports for its jets, to exchanging information with the United States that has led to renditions or torture, to allowing the rendition of terrorist suspects from their soil.
His report also concludes that there is evidence to support suspicions that two countries, Poland and Romania, have allowed secret CIA detention centres on their soil, despite strong denials from both countries.
Mr Marty reports: “Whilst hard evidence, at least according to the strict meaning of the word, is still not forthcoming, a number of coherent and converging elements indicate that secret detention centres have indeed existed and unlawful inter-state transfers have taken place in Europe.”

From logistics to turning a blind eye: Europe’s role in terror abductions · Damning verdict from human rights body· Evidence points to secret jails in Eastern Europe Stephen Grey and Ian CobainWednesday June 7, 2006The Guardian The full extent of European collusion with the CIA during operations to abduct terrorism suspects and fly them to countries where they may be tortured is laid bare today by the continent’s most authoritative human rights body.
Several states have allowed the agency to snatch their own residents, others have offered extensive logistical support, while many have turned a blind eye, according to the Council of Europe.
The UK stands accused of not only allowing the use of British airspace and airports, but of providing information that was used during the torture of one suspect. The report adds that there is strong evidence to suspect two European states, Poland and Romania, of permitting the CIA to operate secret prisons on their soil, despite official denials.
‘Active participation’
The report follows an investigation by Dick Marty, chairman of the Council’s legal affairs and human rights committee. It has been obtained by the Guardian ahead of its publication in Paris today. Mr Marty says that far from being hoodwinked by a “CIA plot”, 14 European states were fully aware of much of what was going on. “It is now clear – although we are still far from having established the whole truth – that authorities in several European countries actively participated with the CIA in these unlawful activities. Other countries ignored them knowingly, or did not want to know.”
Although Mr Marty concludes that the US must bear responsibility for the extraordinary rendition, he says the programme could operate only with “the intentional or grossly negligent collusion of the European partners”.
The inquiry was launched in November amid political outrage over reports, first published in the Washington Post, of the existence of CIA detention centres in Eastern Europe. Other media investigations, including one by the Guardian, had uncovered evidence of the use of British and other European airports by aircraft that have been involved in renditions.
A breakthrough in Mr Marty’s inquiry came with agreement by EuroControl, the air traffic agency, to hand over thousands of records of flight plans filed electronically with controllers by the pilots of alleged CIA planes since 2001. While the majority of the flights had nothing to do with prisoner operations, Mr Marty’s report provides the first official confirmation that some flights correspond with the accounts given by prisoners of their abduction and transfer to secret jails by the CIA.
His report highlights the movement of 18 suspects, all of which used European facilities or airspace, which are part of a series of “rendition circuits” which he likens to a “spider’s web spun across the globe”. He warns that the US, believing that “neither conventional judicial instruments nor those established under the framework of the laws of war could effectively counter the new forms of international terrorism” has decided to “develop new legal concepts” that have left hundreds of terrorist suspects deprived of their liberty, outside US territory but under US control and denied any access to their fundamental legal rights. “This legal approach is utterly alien to the European tradition and sensibility, and is clearly contrary to the European Convention on Human Rights and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.”
Mr Marty says that while Spain, Turkey, Germany and Cyprus have provided staging posts for rendition operations, Italy, Sweden, Bosnia, and Macedonia have all allowed the rendition of their residents from their soil. He accuses the latter of covering up its involvement in the CIA rendition of a German citizen, Khaled el-Masri, to Afghanistan, after he arrived in Macedonia in January 2004. Britain – like Ireland, Portugal, and Greece – is described as providing stopovers for CIA planes, but the greatest criticisms levelled against London are about the handing over of information about its residents and former residents that has, says Mr Marty, led to renditions and torture. For instance, information about a former London student, Benyam Mohammed, 27, is alleged to have been used during his torture in Morocco, where he was taken following his arrest in Pakistan.
Finally, Mr Marty alleges there is enough concrete evidence, mainly consisting of flight data, to support suspicions that Romania and Poland have allowed the operation of secret CIA detention centres on their soil, despite official denials.
Detention centres
The evidence against Romania, he says, comes from a “rendition circuit” involving a CIA Boeing 737 with registration N313P, that began in Cyprus on January 21 2004. The plane and the CIA team on board went from Cyprus to Morocco the following day to pick up Benyam Mohammed and take him to Afghanistan. The plane then returned to Europe to render el-Masri, on January 24, also to Afghanistan. Finally, Mr Marty believes, the pattern of the flight indicates it transferred another suspect from Afghanistan to a secret detention place in Romania.
The drop-off in Romania could not be explained, says Mr Marty, by any need to refuel. “The most likely hypothesis is that the purpose of this flight was to transport one or several detainees from Kabul to Romania,” he concludes. He adds that although he has not uncovered definitive evidence of a secret detention centre in Romania, his findings justify further investigation. Romania, he adds, “is thus far the only Council of Europe member state to be located on one of the rendition circuits we believe we have identified, and which bears all the characteristics of a detainee transfer or drop-off point”.
Mr Marty also highlights a number of flights from Afghanistan to Poland at times when it is now known that terrorism suspects were being transferred from Kabul to unknown destinations. His suspicions were fuelled by the Polish authorities’ failure to cooperate: while EuroControl’s records detailed a series of flights into the country, including
a number to the Szymany air base, north east of Warsaw, local officials claimed they had no records of the visits. Mr Marty describes that as “highly unusual”, and adds: “Poland cannot be considered to be outside the rendition circuits simply because it has failed to furnish information corroborating my data from other sources.”