Abducted imam aided CIA ally (Italy/CIA abduction case)

Chicago Tribune ^ | 4/3/05 | John Crewdson , Tom Hundley and Altin Raxhimi

[endthematrix]

Last month, Italian authorities charged 13 CIA operatives with kidnapping an Islamic cleric known as Abu Omar. Now former Albanian intelligence officials reveal that the imam was once an informant valued by the CIA.

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The Chicago Tribune, citing the former second-ranking official of the Albanian intelligence service, reported in its Sunday editions that Moustafa Hassan Nasr, also known as Abu Omar, was a valuable source of information in the mid-1990s to the CIA about the close-knit community of Islamic fundamentalists living in exile in Albania, a formerly communist country in the Balkans.

*this is excerpted per FR rules and is a longer post, but well worth the information.

[endthematrix]

ping.

August 1995 - Abu Omar, an Egyptian, had been living in Albania for four years and working for a Muslim charity, the Human Relief and Construction Agency (HRCA).

Surfaced again in Rome in 1997, where he was accorded political refugee status. Moving north to Milan, he gravitated to the Islamic institute on Via Quaranta, which has a reputation as the most radical Islamic outpost in Italy.

[FairOpinion]

Interesting.

I am not registered at the Chicago Tribune, so I couldn't read the article there.

There is another one, which presumably has similar info (?)

Imam once informed on militants for CIA

http://www.gazettetimes.com/articles/2005/07/03/news/nation/nat11.txt

Maybe it was never a kidnapping, but a way to give cover to the Imam.

I recall reading in earlier articles, that eventually he called home from Turkey (?). Obviously if the CIA really had kidnapped him, they wouldn't have let him loose.

[FairOpinion]

And a rather long interesting article with more detail -- but who knows how accurate -- any excuse, to bash the Bush administration...

Bourne Again?

The real-life spy adventure uncovered in Italy's 'kidnapped imam' case raises more troubling questions about how the Bush administration came to invade Iraq, and what's happened to the war on terror.


http://msnbc.msn.com/id/8475633/site/newsweek/

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The link was active, now it's not...DARN!

I guess others can use BUGMENOT.COM

[endthematrix]

I really hate to have hip boots on to wade through MSM articles, especially when our CIA and our allies are working to get scum off the streets. The Tribune article dangled the idea that Omar maybe "moderate" (must be good for the SCOTUS?)