Europeans probe CIA role in abductions

Assembling pieces of a puzzle
In Germany, a 41-year-old man, Khaled Masri, has told authorities that he was locked up during a vacation in the Balkans and flown to Kabul, Afghanistan in January 2004, where he was held as a suspected terrorist for four months. He said that only after his captors realized he was not the al Qaeda suspect they were looking for did they take him back to the Balkans and dump him on a hillside along the Albanian border. He recalled his captors spoke English with an American accent.

German prosecutors, after several months of scrutinizing his account, have confirmed several key parts of his story and are investigating it as a kidnapping.

"So far, I've seen no sign that what he's saying is incorrect. Many, many pieces of the puzzle have checked out," said Martin Hofmann, a Munich-based prosecutor overseeing the investigation. "I have to try to find out who held him, who tortured or abused him, and who is responsible for this."

In Sweden, a parliamentary investigation has found that CIA agents wearing hoods orchestrated the forced removal in December 2001 of two Egyptian nationals on a U.S.-registered airplane to Cairo, where the men claimed they were tortured in prison.

One of the men was later exonerated as a terrorism suspect by Egyptian police, while the other remains in prison there. Details of the secret operation have shocked many in Sweden, a leading proponent of human rights.

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."

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