Sabrina de Sousa | |
---|---|
Born | 1956 (age 67–68) |
Nationality | Portugal and United States |
Conviction(s) | Kidnapping |
Sabrina de Sousa (born c. 1956 in Goa, Portuguese India) is a Portuguese-American ex-CIA operative [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] convicted (in absentia) of kidnapping. In 2009 she was convicted of kidnapping in Italy for her role in the 2003 abduction of the Muslim imam Abu Omar, who was kidnapped in Milan and subsequently tortured. Sousa was sentenced to four years in prison for her role in the kidnapping. A European Arrest Warrant valid throughout Europe was subsequently issued for her arrest, and she was arrested in Portugal under that arrest warrant in 2015. She was due to be extradited back to Italy to serve her sentence, having exhausted her appeal rights against her extradition in Portugal, when the President of Italy issued her a pardon ending extradition proceedings against her in February 2017. She was still due to serve community service when she left Italy for the US in October 2019 citing fears for her safety.
In 2009, Sousa sued the U.S. State Department, claiming that the State Department should grant her diplomatic immunity for her role in the kidnapping, irrespective of the fact that diplomatic immunity is granted by the host country. The State Department denied that she had diplomatic immunity, and she lost her lawsuit against the State Department. In a July 27, 2013, interview with the McClatchy News Service, she said that she worked undercover for the CIA when the kidnapping took place. She maintains she played no role in the kidnapping, was unaware of the plans, and was on a ski trip when it took place.
Sousa was born in Goa, Portuguese India, and grew up in Mumbai, India. She is a citizen of Portugal and the United States, having obtained her U.S. citizenship in 1985. [6]
The underlying case is called the "Abu Omar case" or the "Imam Rapito affair". Abu Omar, also known as Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr and Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr, is a Muslim cleric, who on February 17, 2003, was abducted by the CIA, transported to the Aviano Air Base, from which he was transferred to Egypt, where he was interrogated (and allegedly tortured). [7] [8] The case involves "kidnapping charges in Italy for the seizure of a suspected terrorist." [9] The Italian government originally denied having played any role in the abduction, but Italian prosecutors Armando Spataro and Ferdinand Enrico Pomarici indicted two dozen American and Italian government employees and agents. [10]
One of those were Sousa. She is not alleged to have kidnapped Omar herself, but is said to have "helped make false documents to mislead investigators." [11] Italian authorities issued an arrest warrant in 2006 for Sousa. [12] They named her publicly in July 2008. [13] She claims an alibi that she was "vacationing at a ski resort nearly 130 miles away in Madonna di Campiglio, Italy." [9]
Sousa is alleged by the Italian judicial system to be an intelligence officer. [14] [9] They claim that she is part of a "CIA network", [15] serving under diplomatic cover. [16] She claims to be a diplomat. [14] [9] [6] [17] [12] [18] She was registered with the United States Embassy in Rome as a Second Secretary, but posted in Milan. [19] She was a State Department employee, [11] until she resigned in February 2009. [14]
She was convicted of kidnapping for her role in the Imam rapito affair on November 4, 2009, by an Italian court, after a trial in absentia and a plea of not guilty. [20] [21]
She was detained at the Lisbon airport in Portugal on October 5, 2015 [22] [23] and her passport confiscated, based on an outstanding warrant from her 2009 conviction. [22] [23] In January 2016, she was ordered extradited to Italy to serve her sentence. [23] De Sousa appealed the ruling; working to clear her name, including writing a memoir about her activities, she disclaimed any involvement in the affair. [23] On April 11, 2016, her appeal was denied [24] by the Portuguese Supreme Court, which upheld the extradition order. [6]
De Sousa filed a further appeal to Portugal's Constitutional Court, based on the difference between how Portugal and Italy handle convictions in absentia (she could not count on Italy granting her a re-trial, whereas a right to a re-trial is routinely allowed in Portugal) according to the New York Times. On 8 June 2016, the Portuguese Constitutional Court upheld the Supreme Court's decision. Sabrina de Sousa was due to be extradited to Italy at that time.
Sousa sued for a declaration that she is a diplomat with immunity from prosecution: [25]
In the lawsuit filed Wednesday (May 2009) in federal court in Washington, Sabrina De Sousa wants diplomatic immunity and government-funded legal counsel in Italy. She claims she was a foreign service officer working in Milan and was not involved in the 2003 seizure of Muslim cleric Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr, also known as Abu Omar. But Italian prosecutors say De Sousa, a 53-year-old India native, was a CIA officer [26] working under diplomatic cover and was one of four main U.S. officials responsible for coordinating Omar's capture from a Milan street in broad daylight on February 17, 2003.
— AP story [9]
De Souza tried to appeal her extradition on the grounds that the CIA had documents that would establish she did not play the roles in the kidnapping for she was convicted, but that the documents were unavailable for her to use to defend herself, because they were classified as secrets. [27] [28] [29] [30]
De Souza eventually lost all her appeals against extradition. [27] [28] [31] [32] [33] [34] In an email to the Associated Press De Souza's lawyers wrote that Portuguese authorities took her into custody on February 20, 2017, and that she would be transferred to Italian custody within a few days.
On February 28, 2017, Sergio Mattarella, the President of Italy, commuted Sousa's sentence, to just three years. [35] Italian law allows convicts sentenced to 3 years or less to serve an alternate sentence under house arrest, in lieu of incarceration. De Sousa's initial sentence had been 7 years having previously been reduced to 4 years. [20]
After Mattarella's partial commutation, Italian prosecutors revoked their extradition order. [35] [36] De Sousa had expressed confidence that, when inaugurated Donald Trump would save her from imprisonment [37] [38] [39] leading to speculation Italy had succumbed to diplomatic pressure from the new administration. [40] [41] [42]
In October 2019, Sousa left Italy for the U.S. claiming "she fears for her safety". [43]
Ira Samuel Einhorn, known as "The Unicorn Killer", was an American environmental activist and convicted murderer. His moniker, "the Unicorn", was derived from his surname; Einhorn means "unicorn" in German. As an environmental activist, Einhorn was a speaker at the first Earth Day event in Philadelphia in 1970. On September 9, 1977, Einhorn's ex-girlfriend Holly Maddux disappeared following a trip to collect her belongings from the apartment she and Einhorn had shared in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Eighteen months later, police found her partially decomposed body in a trunk in Einhorn's closet.
Mustafa Kamel Mustafa, also known as Abu Hamza al-Masri, or simply Abu Hamza, is an Egyptian cleric who was the imam of Finsbury Park Mosque in London, where he preached Islamic fundamentalist views.
In an extradition, one jurisdiction delivers a person accused or convicted of committing a crime in another jurisdiction, into the custody of the other's law enforcement. It is a cooperative law enforcement procedure between the two jurisdictions, and depends on the arrangements made between them. In addition to legal aspects of the process, extradition also involves the physical transfer of custody of the person being extradited to the legal authority of the requesting jurisdiction.
Trial in absentia is a criminal proceeding in a court of law in which the person being tried is not present. In absentia is Latin for "in (the) absence". Its interpretation varies by jurisdiction and legal system.
Abu Salem, also known as Aqil Ahmed Azmi and Abu Samaan, is an Indian criminal gangster and terrorist from Azamgarh district in Uttar Pradesh, Central India. Abu Salem worked in the D-Company as a driver transporting artillery and contraband. Later he rose among the ranks after he introduced a new strategy of hiring unemployed youths from his hometown Azamgarh to come to Mumbai, execute shoot-outs and return the next day remaining untraced by the Mumbai police. He is currently serving a life sentence in India.
Cesare Battisti is an Italian former member of the terrorist group Armed Proletarians for Communism (PAC), who is currently imprisoned after years on the run. PAC was a far-left militant group active in Italy in the late 1970s during the period known as the "Years of Lead". Battisti was sentenced to life imprisonment in Italy for four homicides. He fled first to France in 1981, where he received protection under the Mitterrand doctrine.
Extraordinary rendition is a euphemism for state-sponsored kidnapping in another jurisdiction and transfer to a third state. The phrase usually refers to a United States-led program used during the War on Terror, which had the purpose of circumventing the source country's laws on interrogation, detention, extradition and/or torture. Extraordinary rendition is a type of extraterritorial abduction, but not all extraterritorial abductions include transfer to a third country.
Stephen R. Kappes was the Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (DDCIA), until his resignation on April 14, 2010. He had served in the CIA since 1981, with a two-year hiatus. A career clandestine operations professional, Kappes supervised the extraordinary rendition program, a non-judicial system of rendering persons suspected of terrorism to secret locations where most of them were interrogated. Kappes also helped persuade Libyan leader Muammar al-Gaddafi to abandon his nuclear weapons program in 2003. In 2009, Kappes was convicted in absentia by an Italian court for his headquarters-based role in the rendition and torture of an Egyptian citizen who was kidnapped from Italian soil by the CIA.
Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, also known as Abu Omar, is an Egyptian cleric. In 2003, he was living in Milan, Italy, from where he was kidnapped and tortured in Egypt. This "Abu Omar case" prompted a series of investigations in Italy, culminating in the criminal convictions of 22 CIA operatives, a U.S. Air Force colonel, and two Italian accomplices, as well as Nasr, himself.
Khaled El-Masri is a German and Lebanese citizen who was mistakenly abducted by the Macedonian police in 2003, and handed over to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). While in CIA custody, he was flown to Afghanistan, where he was held at a black site and routinely interrogated, beaten, strip-searched, sodomized, and subjected to other cruel forms of inhumane and degrading treatment and torture. After El-Masri held hunger strikes, and was detained for four months in the "Salt Pit", the CIA finally admitted his arrest was a mistake and released him. He is believed to be among an estimated 3,000 detainees, including several key leaders of al Qaeda, whom the CIA captured from 2001 to 2005, in its campaign to dismantle terrorist networks.
Robert Seldon Lady is an American intelligence officer. Lady was the CIA' station chief in Milan during the Abu Omar case.
Nicolò Pollari is a general of the Italian Guardia di Finanza, who was the former head of Italy's national military intelligence agency, or SISMI, from 1 October 2001 until his resignation on 20 November 2006.
Colonel Joseph L. Romano III is an officer in the United States Air Force and one of 26 American nationals charged by Italian authorities with the 2003 kidnapping of Italian resident cleric Hassan Nasr as part of an alleged covert CIA operation. Romano was subsequently convicted in absentia of kidnapping. On 5 April 2013, Giorgio Napolitano, the President of the Italian Republic, pardoned Romano.
Jeffrey W. Castelli is a CIA officer who served as CIA station chief in Rome at the time of the Niger uranium forgeries. His subsequent involvement in the CIA-led kidnapping of Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr would lead to his subsequent sentencing to seven years in prison, by an Italian court, in 2013.
The Abu Omar Case was the abduction and transfer to Egypt of the Imam of Milan Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, also known as Abu Omar. The case was picked by the international media as one of the better-documented cases of extraordinary rendition carried out in a joint operation by the United States' Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Italian Military Intelligence and Security Service (SISMI) in the context of the global war on terrorism declared by the George W. Bush administration.
Guido Salvini is an Italian judge, based in Milan. He issued European arrest warrants in 2005 against approximatively 20 CIA agents accused of having taken part in the abduction of Abu Omar, the Egyptian cleric in Milan in 2003. The case is known in Italy as the Abu Omar case. Before that, Guido Salvini was in charge of investigations, since July 1988, concerning Italy's strategy of tension during the 1970s.
John Chris Kiriakou is an American author, journalist and former intelligence officer. Kiriakou is a columnist with Reader Supported News and co-host of Political Misfits on Sputnik Radio.
The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has been involved in Italian politics since the end of World War II. The CIA helped swing the 1948 general election in favor of the centrist Christian Democrats and would continue to intervene in Italian politics until at least the early 1960s.
Jeffrey Alexander Sterling is an American lawyer and former CIA employee who was arrested, charged, and convicted of violating the Espionage Act for revealing details about Operation Merlin to journalist James Risen. Sterling claimed he was prosecuted as punishment for filing a race discrimination lawsuit against the CIA. The case was based on what the judge called "very powerful circumstantial evidence." In May 2015, Sterling was sentenced to 3½ years in prison. In 2016 and 2017, he filed complaints and wrote letters regarding mistreatment, lack of medical treatment for life-threatening conditions, and false allegations against him by corrections officers leading to further punitive measures. He was released from prison in January 2018.
Saad bin Khalid Al Jabri is a former major-general, minister of state and long-time adviser to deposed Crown Prince Muhammad bin Nayef of Saudi Arabia. He has been living in exile in Canada since May 2017. The Saudi government has unsuccessfully sought to have him extradited back to Saudi Arabia on charges of corruption. Al Jabri has accused the Saudi government of orchestrating assassination attempts on him and of holding two of his children, along with other relatives, as hostages in a bid to force his return.
{{cite web}}
: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)Ms. De Sousa, who resigned from the C.I.A. in 2009, was sentenced in absentia in Italy to six years in prison. She has asked the Italian authorities for a pardon.
Da Aviano, l'imam è stato trasferito con un aereo speciale nella base americana di Ramstein in Germania e da qui ha proseguito, con un altro jet, verso il Cairo, dove è stato buttato in carcere speciale. Qui ha subito pesanti interrogatori, segnati da violenze e pressioni psicologiche e fisiche. Quasi un anno dopo gli egiziani hanno rimesso in libertà Abu Omar che ha raccontato alla famiglia quanto gli era successo. Rivelazioni che lo hanno riportato in galera — dove si trova tuttora — ma che hanno segnato la prima svolta nell'indagine in Italia.
At the same time Jeff Castelli, allegedly together with the diplomat Sabrina De Sousa, reprimanded Lady and ordered him to cut off all relations with D'Ambrosio. Jeff Castelli was then CIA station chief in Rome. Arrest warrants have been issued for Jeff Castelli and Sabrina De Sousa, as well as the agent Ralph Henry Russomando, accused of creating a false dossier to mislead Italian investigators, and Colonel Joseph Romano, then head of the Aviano Air Force Base and now at the Pentagon.
A major news story by Jonathan Landay of McClatchy features the first public comments from Sabrina De Sousa, a former CIA officer who has revealed details around the kidnapping of radical Islamist cleric Abu Omar in Italy in 2003.
At 56, Sabrina De Sousa's life has come to be defined by a landmark criminal case that has been playing out in Italy for much of the past decade, ever since prosecutors began investigating the disappearance of an Egyptian cleric, Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, known as Abu Omar.
De Sousa told Fox News she was detained by the Portuguese judiciary police on Monday -- despite urgent appeals to the Trump administration to intervene. She said Portuguese officials were working with the Italian government to select the prison where she will be incarcerated.
A former U.S. Central Intelligence Agency officer living in Portugal has lost her final appeal there to avoid going to prison in Italy for her part in a U.S. program that involved kidnapping suspected terrorists and flying them to other countries for interrogation.
However, she is unequivocal in asserting that she had no connection to Abu Omar's kidnapping. De Sousa didn't know Omar was being kidnapped that day in 2003, she says, and was on a ski trip in the Alps with her kids at the moment of the kidnapping. "This is a bit of scapegoatery" for an embarrassing and illegal CIA operation gone wrong, De Sousa says.
A Portuguese court has ordered police to extradite a former CIA agent to Italy, where she is due to serve a four-year prison sentence after being convicted of involvement in a U.S. program that kidnapped suspects for interrogation, her lawyer said Tuesday.
De Sousa looks set to be the first to actually go to jail over the case - the other 22 have not returned to Italy and three have been given presidential pardons. The Nasr case was the world's first judicial examination of the controversial practice of extraordinary rendition in the so-called war on terror.
Portugal will soon extradite former CIA officer Sabrina de Sousa to Italy for incarceration. Her crime? She executed the orders of her CIA superiors, who were acting under the direction of the administration with oversight from Congress.
Ms. de Sousa was initially sentenced to seven years for kidnapping; that was later reduced to four years, and President Sergio Mattarella reduced it on Tuesday to three. Under Italian law, sentences of three years or less are eligible for alternatives to imprisonment.
A former CIA officer, convicted for involvement in the kidnapping of an Egyptian cleric in Italy, will not be deported from Portugal and will be released, her lawyer said on Wednesday.
"O presidente [Donald Trump] e esta Administração pode fazer parar este precedente, para que diplomatas, militares e agentes dos serviços de informações norte-americanos não sejam condenados por tribunais estrangeiros", disse Sabrina de Sousa numa entrevista à Fox News e que se encontra disponível na página da estação de televisão desde quarta-feira.
A Fox News é provavelmente o único canal de notícias a que o atual presidente dos Estados Unidos, Donald Trump, dá algum crédito, depois de há um mês ter descrito os jornalistas, no seu todo, como "os seres humanos mais desonestos à face da Terra". Ainda durante o último fim de semana, a propósito de uma referência que tinha feito a um atentado na Suécia que nunca aconteceu, e sendo conhecida a sua aversão à prática da leitura, Trump tinha-se desculpado com o seu canal preferido: "Vi na Fox News".
The United States State Department said Wednesday it was "deeply disappointed" over the imminent extradition of a former CIA agent from Portugal to Italy for her alleged role in a counterterrorism operation authorised by the US government some 14 years ago.
The news will likely be met with relief by the US and Italian governments and will mean that the two countries will avoid diplomatic tensions ahead of Donald Trump's planned visit to Italy in May, when the US president attends the G7 meeting of world leaders in Sicily.
I hope that Trump will recognize the inherent unfairness of this situation," he said, adding that Italy and the United States could have handled the case of De Sousa and others convicted in a more diplomatic fashion. "There are ways that allies and friends work it out.
The Donald Trump-led White House's involvement in the case will be closely watched, in light of Trump's open dismissal of the US' allies in Europe.