Indian American ex-CIA officer Sabrina De Sousa, who is a native of India and holds a Portuguese and U.S. nationality, made another unsuccessful attempt to visit her relatives in India from Portugal. She was arrested on Feb. 20, in Lisbon, in relation to a 2003 kidnapping of a Egyptian cleric in Italy.De Sousa has claimed that she was under diplomatic cover in Milan. She is expected to be extradited to Italy to face a prison sentence.
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The Indian-American has reportedly acted under the secret U.S. rendition plan that was carried out during the George W. Bush administration, in which suspected terrorists were captured and taken to other countries for interrogation. She was one of 26 Americans who are convicted by an Italian court, for nabbing Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr, aka Abu Omar in Feb. 2003. Nasr was taken to Egypt where he has remained in prison for four years before being released. He claimed that he had been tortured at a military base.
De Sousa has resigned from the CIA in 2009, but was convicted by the Italian court in-absentia and sentenced to four years in prison. She returned to Portugal in 2015and was arrested on Feb. 20 in Lisbon while trying to fly to India. De Sousa’s former colleagues had been granted pardon by Italy and her lawyer has been requesting the same treatment for his client.
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She was born in Goa and was brought up in Mumbai. De Sousa sued the State Department demanding that she should have been given diplomatic immunity. She lost her lawsuit. She, in an interview with McClatchy News Service on July 27, 2013, claimed that she had played no role in the kidnapping and was on a ski trip at that time. She said that the CIA had “inflated the threat,that the preacher (Abu Omar) had posed and that the United States had then allowed Italy to prosecute her and other Americans to shield President George W. Bush and other U.S. officials from the responsibility for approving the operation,” the McClatchy news report said.
By Premji
