Free Republic

ROME (AP) - An Italian prosecutor is investigating whether U.S. agents played a role in the alleged abduction from Milan of a suspected Islamic militant, according to news reports. The 41-year-old imam, identified as Abu Omar, disappeared in the northern Italian city in February 2003. Milan Prosecutor Armando Spataro is looking at whether he was seized in a CIA operation and flown to Egypt for interrogation, the Corriere della Sera and other newspapers have reported. Last week, the prosecutor visited a joint U.S.-Italian air base in Aviano to find documents on air and vehicle traffic that might shed light on...

For the second time in just over a month, the Italian government has asked a top court to stop a pending trial of 26 Americans, most of them CIA agents, in a case that could provide the first public examination of a secret U.S. program that targeted alleged terror suspects from foreign lands. The State Committee of Lawyers, a government advisory board, was asked to review the procedures that led to indictments handed down last month in connection with the abduction from Milan of a radical cleric named Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, also known as Abu Omar. The government sent...