– ITALIAN COURT RULED FOR CIA

Italy’s highest court, on Wednesday 03/11/2009, dealt a potentially fatal blow to the trial against 26 Americans accused of involvement in the alleged CIA kidnapping of an Egyptian terror suspect, Mustafa Hassan Nasr, in Milan in 2003.

The Constitutional Court sided with the Italian government in saying that prosecutors used classified information to build the case and threw out some key evidence on which the indictments were based.

Though the judges did not formally throw out the indictments, lawyers said the ruling would at least set the case back.

State lawyer Massimo Giannuzzi said prosecutors would have to seek new indictments based on the remaining evidence or reopen the investigation altogether. “We are quite satisfied,” Giannuzzi said.

The American suspects — all but one identified by prosecutors as CIA agents — were accused along with seven Italian agents of kidnapping an Egyptian terror suspect from a Milan street on 02/17/2003, in an “Extraordinary Rendition” operation coordinated by the CIA and Italy’s SISMI military intelligence.

 

 

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