CIA kidnap victim offered $2 million In hush money

Wife: Cleric offered $2 million deal

By John Crewdson, Tribune senior correspondent. Sherine Bayoumi and Altin Raxhimi contributed to this report

01/07/07 "Tribune" -- -- ALEXANDRIA, Egypt -- According to Abu Omar's wife, a few months ago two Egyptian officials visited her husband in his Cairo prison cell and made him an offer they hoped he wouldn't refuse.

The offer was $2 million cash, according to the radical cleric's wife Nabila Ghali. All Abu Omar needed to do was sign a paper saying he had come to Egypt of his own accord on Feb. 17, 2003, and to repeat that statement to the news media.

Feb. 17, 2003, is when Abu Omar vanished while walking down a side street in Milan, Italy. Prosecutors in Milan charge that he was kidnapped by the CIA and flown to Egypt, where he has been imprisoned for most of the time since then.

When Abu Omar asked where the money would come from, he was told simply "a foreign intelligence service," according to an Italian investigator in the case. In a letter to another Milan imam after visiting her husband in prison, Ghali described the offer and said her husband never responded to it.

Milan's deputy public prosecutor, Armando Spataro, has the letter now, preserved with other evidence to be used at the trial of 25 CIA operatives, a U.S. Air Force colonel and five senior Italian intelligence officials accused of participating in Abu Omar's kidnapping.

Had Abu Omar agreed to the purported $2 million deal, there would have been no kidnapping, and therefore no case. Spataro's investigators are working to find out who, if anyone, authorized a $2 million payment. A source close to the investigation said Spataro has confirmation from within the Italian intelligence community that the offer was genuine, though not that the Italians were to be the source of the funds.

A few days after the alleged visit by the two Egyptians, Abu Omar was moved from Torah Prison on the southern edge of Cairo to police headquarters in this Mediterranean port city, where he was born and where his family assembled on a Sunday evening in late October to discuss his case.

Gathered in the high-rise apartment of his sister, Rawya, and her husband, Magdi, a prominent Cairo lawyer--both asked that their last name not be used--were Abu Omar's younger brother, Hitham, a chemical engineer and devout Muslim with a long gray beard, and Ghali, a schoolteacher dressed head to toe in black.

The family recounted Abu Omar's Kafkaesque encounters with the Egyptian legal system, which began 13 months after his abduction in Milan.

Searching

Suspecting that he had been forcibly taken to Egypt, his colleagues in Milan contacted Cairo lawyer Montasser El Zayat.

"I searched for him in the prisons of Egypt, and I presented official requests," El Zayat said in an interview. "And nobody responded to my requests."

The reason, he explained, is that as far as the authorities were concerned, Abu Omar was not in Egypt. "We are talking about a man who was kidnapped in another state and given to Egypt outside the framework of the law," El Zayat said.

The search finally paid off by happenstance. "Someone had witnessed him at the building of State Security," El Zayat recalled. "Other people who were in jail at that time and were later released, one of them saw him."

In March 2004, El Zayat brought his client's case before a special Cairo court set up to handle political prisoners. El Zayat argued that because there were no outstanding charges against Abu Omar in Egypt, and no evidence of his involvement in terrorist activities, there was no legal basis for his detention.

The court agreed, ordering his release. Before complying, however, authorities extracted promises from him not to speak about his abduction or his treatment in prison, El Zayat said.

"They made him sign papers in which he states that he came to Egypt on his own accord, and that he was arrested at the airport in Egypt," El Zayat said. "And after signing those papers they let him go."

Defiance

As recounted by Abu Omar in a letter written later from prison, he was warned "that I should beware of opening my mouth and telling anything about what had happened to me, from my kidnapping in Italy to my torture in Egypt."

Abu Omar admits that he did the opposite. "I returned to my home and family in Alexandria," he wrote, "and I stayed with them for approximately 20 days, and during those days I called my wife and children in Europe as well as my friends and told them everything in detail, beginning with my abduction to my torture in Egypt."

After less than a month as a free man, Abu Omar was re-arrested as a "danger to the state" under an "emergency decree" that has remained in force since the 1981 assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat.

According to Rawya, ever since then Abu Omar has been on a judicial merry-go-round: ordered released by the courts for lack of evidence, transferred from Torah Prison to police custody in Alexandria, held there for a few days, then re-arrested and returned to prison. "This has happened now seven or eight times," she said.

In late October, after the court ordered his release yet again, Abu Omar found himself at police headquarters in Alexandria. He seemed optimistic that this time the police might let him go home.

"I want to be a good Muslim, to live like a good Muslim," he said in a brief telephone conversation with a freelance reporter assisting the Tribune. The reporter was at the home of Abu Omar's first wife in Albania, and Abu Omar was using the cell phone of his second wife, Ghali, while she visited him in custody in Egypt.

After 45 months of confinement, the 43-year-old cleric expressed hope that he would be released in a day or two.

Sitting in Rawya's living room, Abu Omar's family was anxious, but not particularly hopeful. "What's happening now is exactly what's happened before," Ghali said. "He will not be released from police custody. He will be re-arrested."

A few days later her prediction was borne out when the police arrested Abu Omar under the emergency decree and returned him to prison.

"We have done everything they have asked of us," said his brother-in-law, the lawyer. "Nothing has worked."