Italy’s president has shaved two years off the sentence of a former CIA base chief convicted in absentia in the 2003 extraordinary rendition abduction of an Egyptian terror suspect.
With the decree, announced Wednesday night by the presidential palace, President Sergio Mattarella reduced to seven from nine years Robert Seldon Lady’s sentence. Mattarella also wiped out the three-year sentence handed down by a Milan court to another US defendant convicted in absentia, Betnie Medero.
The palace said Italy’s head of state above all took into consideration Barack Obama’s ending the practice of extraordinary renditions, which Italy and the European Union consider “incompatible with the fundamental principles of a state of law”.
In all, 26 Americans were convicted in absentia in the kidnapping of Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr.
Nasr, also known as Abu Omar, was kidnapped while walking to noon prayers at a Milan mosque on 17 February 2003. He had been under investigation in Italy for allegedly recruiting jihadi fighters.
Prosecutors claimed CIA operatives snatched him with the help of two Italian intelligence officers, drove him to Aviano air force base, and then flew him to a Nato base in Germany en route to Cairo, Egypt. When Nasr emerged from an Egyptian prison four years later, he claimed he had been tortured.
