“We do not know each other,” the Somali proposed to his friend.
“You do not even need to say it,” Merai said. “They already asked me if I knew you, and I answered that I met you at the mosque.”
“Fine, let us stick to that version, because they have nothing on me… . But quite honestly here in your place there is something wrong. I am astonished by the business of the bag”—which held potentially incriminating evidence. “How could they know it was there? How did they bring me the bag? Why are they asking me where the training camps in Syria are? I am speechless.”
“You know, they try to get you to speak. They try to make you believe that they know everything, but they know nothing.”
“When we were arrested and they put me in the car and pointed a pistol at me, they told me they had gathered information on me and they had spoken to the Americans. I told them they were enemies of God, to take their hands off me. After that, they asked me what my true nationality was.”
“Take them for a ride,” Merai counseled. “Tell them you are Egyptian. Let us thank God they did not find the passports. I have few things at home. I have only money, but the rest is hidden.”
“The Moroccan passports?”
“Nothing. When they took us, I had nothing on me. I had given everything to Brahim”—the librarian of the mosque on Via Quaranta.
“How about the Moroccan passport that they prepared for you and that they gave you when we sat down?”
“Brahim has it. He knows what to do. I am not so stupid as to keep it on me. When we get out of here, you disappear at once and I will do the same. If you need support, Brahim knows where the money is hidden too. I have never had anything on me. If you want to take the passports, take them. He knows all my hideouts, and he knows all my movements. Sometimes even we forget where we have hidden things. He is a tomb.”
“First let us get out of here, and then I will try to get to Romania because I have support there. I am sorry to put the question to you again, but are you sure that this is the first time you have been brought here? Are you not under surveillance?”
“I would know if I were under surveillance… . I do not think I am, because I do not use the telephone very much. I constantly change my phone card, and the phone calls that we made together, we made them from outside.”
“I hope that is true, that they do not have any phone calls, because if that were the case it would be a problem for the brothers.” And it was: the U.S. National Security Agency had intercepted several calls from pay phones in Italy to satellite phones used by Ansar captains in Syria. The Italians had intercepted similar calls.
“But,” the Somali continued, “I think you are under surveillance.”
“That may be true. Who is not under surveillance? All they have to do is see you once and they watch your movements.”
“No, brother. Now, I remember well Quaranta-Quaranta. I recall a guy who told me it was better to go to Afghanistan or Iran than to go to Via Quaranta. This is the most dangerous place after London because it is known worldwide for the training of terrorists and for logistical and financial support. It is well known for being in the firing line. The whole world knows Quaranta-Quaranta.”
“The enemies of God, sons of dogs … are terrorized by us. Sooner or later, maybe tomorrow morning, they’ll have news because both the Americans and Israelis will pay.”
“The enemy of God came to touch my Quran.”
“And did you let him?”
“No.”
“Tell him to leave and not touch it even with his finger.”
“He told me he wanted to check it, and I told him I would open it page by page. He made me open it three times.”
“They love life. I want to be a martyr. I live for jihad. In this life, there is nothing. Life is afterward—above all, brother, the indescribable feeling of dying a martyr. God, help me to be Your martyr!”
They recited verses of the Quran together and sang an anthem to jihad. A little later the Somali fretted, “But when they arrest people, do they usually put two of them together?”
“No!”
“So how come they put us together?”
“They conducted a roundup, and all the cells are undoubtedly full.”
“Bizarre.”
Both men were convicted of crimes related to terrorism.
By February of 2003 the investigators of DIGOS thought they were a couple of months shy of having enough evidence to arrest Abu Omar. They were, however, in no hurry to do so, because they wanted to see where else he might lead them.
On Monday the seventeenth, one month before the United States invaded Iraq, Abu Omar stepped out of his flat and set off down Via Conte Verde under a brilliant sky for the dhuhr. The dhuhr is the second of Islam’s five daily prayers and must be held neither earlier than midday nor later than when a shadow cast by the sun is twice its midday length. At Viale Jenner the dhuhr was held just after noon. Abu Omar had with him his keys and mobile phone, his passport and residency permit, his social security and health care cards, and, because he intended to pay the rent that afternoon, €450. He never paid the rent.
NABILA GHALI began to worry about her husband when by late afternoon he had not come home and had not returned calls to his mobile phone. She called friends who frequented the mosque, but they hadn’t seen him. Then she called friends who might have been in touch with him by phone, but they knew nothing either. She did not call the police. Next day, however, Abu Omar still not having returned, she seems to have contacted a branch of the municipal police, asked to report him missing, and been told that an absence of twenty-four hours did not warrant a missing-person investigation.
Abu Imad, the imam at Viale Jenner, was making his own inquiries. Although he did not have the greatest love for Abu Omar, neither did he like his disappearance. Nobody Abu Imad spoke to, however, knew anything of Abu Omar’s whereabouts, and none of the hospitals he called had a patient matching Abu Omar’s description. Finally Abu Imad called a lawyer, an Italian who had defended Islamists charged with terrorism, and three days after Abu Omar’s disappearance, the lawyer called DIGOS to ask whether the Italian government had detained him. A DIGOS officer said the government had not, and he encouraged the lawyer to send Nabila Ghali to file a missing-person report. Later that day, Ghali went to a police station and did.
The police asked the expected questions: Had Abu Omar ever gone absent before? Where had he gone in the week before his disappearance? Did he travel much? Was there any reason he might want to hide? Ghali told them her husband was a pious man and that in the week before his disappearance, he had left the apartment only on religious errands, some in town, some beyond. When he was in Milan, it was his habit to walk to the mosque to attend the dhuhr. When he left Milan, it was to preach. On the Friday before his disappearance, one of the brothers had picked him up and driven him to Gallarate, an hour from Milan, for the jumuah, which is the particular name for the more elaborate dhuhr on Friday. Abu Omar gave a sermon, and the brother drove him home that evening. On Saturday he was picked up by brothers who took him to speak at the mosque in Varese. He stayed overnight after his lecture, and on Sunday a brother took him to Como to speak at the mosque there. He returned to Milan that night. The police told Ghali they would open an investigation.
The next day was Friday, and at the close of the jumuah at Viale Jenner, Abu Imad made an appeal from the pulpit for information about Abu Omar. No one answered during the service, but afterward his wife told him that a sister had told her that another sister had heard from yet another sister that on Monday she had seen an Arab kidnapped. The sisters had not approached Abu Imad during the service because it was forbidden for women to cross from the rear of the mosque, where God had put them, to the front of the mosque, which He had reserved for men. The sister who witnessed the kidnapping had not been at the jumuah, and Abu Imad’s wife had not been able to learn her name or the name of the intermediate sister.
Shortly after this discove
ry, a male parishioner named Sayed Shaban told Abu Imad that a brother at the jumuah had told him the same story—a woman had witnessed a kidnapping. Shaban thought he knew who the woman was, but he would not name her or her husband. He said he did not want to get anyone in trouble. He also declined to tell Abu Imad the name of the brother who told him the story. Abu Imad asked Shaban to ask the witness’s husband to come to the mosque and speak with him, it being more correct to invite the man of the family than the witness herself. Shaban said he would try.
SHAWKI BAKRY SALEM came to Milan from Qalubia, a small province on the edge of the Nile Delta where the immense sprawl of Cairo peters out into farmland. The fertile region yields oranges, figs, apricots, and chickens, but there is not enough land for the many would-be farmers and not enough industry to make up for the lack of land, so in 1996 Salem moved to Milan and took a job as a construction laborer. He left behind a young bride, to whom he monthly remitted a share of his paycheck and, when money permitted, himself. A few years after his emigration, the couple were blessed with a daughter, and two years after that Salem had saved enough money to bring his family to Milan. Merfat Rezk was twenty-two years old and nearly parturient with their second daughter when she arrived in September of 2002. Her new home was a second-floor walkup over a tabaccheria near the corner of Via Guerzoni and Via Carlo Cafiero, the latter named for an earlier emigrant who had gone to London, met Marx and Engels, and returned home to spread L’Internazionale.
Rezk was the woman Sayed Shaban had heard about. After his talk with Abu Imad, he went to Rezk’s husband Salem and said Abu Imad wanted to speak with him about what she had seen. Salem became agitated and said he would rather not. Shaban coaxed, Salem held his ground, Shaban coaxed some more. Just speak to the imam, Shaban said, only to him, nobody else. In the end Salem agreed without enthusiasm.
Abu Imad would later say that when Salem came to his office, he was plainly terrified and would not be calmed. The iman told Salem that the kidnapping his wife had seen was momentous and she must talk to the Italian authorities. Salem would not confirm that his wife had seen a kidnapping—he avoided the mere word. He said only that she had seen something serious, maybe even dangerous, but he would not let her speak about it. He didn’t want to get involved in anything, especially if it was political, which this thing surely was. In fact, he was sending his wife back to Egypt the first chance he got.
Abu Imad told Salem his wife could not remain silent. It was because the kidnapping was political, because Abu Omar was a militant and had presumably been kidnapped for his militancy, that she must speak. Abu Imad acknowledged that Muslims were not in the habit of trusting the Italian authorities, but in this case the Italians were the only hope.
Salem said he did not care about these things. He cared only for the safety of his wife and daughters. “I do not want to fling open the doors of Hell,” he said.
The imam rejoined that if Abu Omar were hurt or killed, Salem would have blood on his soul. Salem was not an overly religious man—Abu Imad couldn’t recall ever having seen him in the mosque before—but in the end the argument persuaded him. He said Abu Imad could give the police his wife’s name.
Abu Imad did, and on February 26, nine days after Abu Omar vanished, Merfat Rezk was interviewed at the stately yellow palazzo on Via Fatabenefratelli that served as DIGOS’s headquarters. She was escorted by her husband, who translated for her, and by Abu Imad and the president of the mosque, Abdelhamid Shaari. She was fearful, and her story came out by bits and pieces. She said that at eleven-thirty on the morning of Monday, February 17, she, her husband, and their two daughters visited a doctor because one of the girls was having trouble hearing. The appointment was brief—they were done before noon—and afterward her husband dropped her and the girls at a bakery on Viale Jenner while he drove on to a doctor’s appointment of his own. She bought some bread, then walked with the girls the half block east to Via Guerzoni and there turned north. She had the baby in her arms and was trying to hold the toddler by the hand, but the girl kept wriggling away, running ahead, and forcing Rezk to catch up. They had walked maybe a hundred meters up Via Guerzoni when she saw that a light-colored van was parked crosswise on the sidewalk, its nose nearly pressed against the high border wall so that they could not squeeze by. She caught up with her playful daughter just before reaching the van, took her hand, and crossed to the other side of the street. As they passed the van, she noticed two men standing near its passenger side who until then had been hidden by the vehicle. One of the men was an Arab who had a long beard and wore a galabia. She had never seen him before.
An officer showed her a picture of Abu Omar and asked if this was the man she had seen. She said could not say for sure. The officer asked if she could say more specifically what color the van was, but she could not say that either. He asked if she could say anything else about the van, but she said she had been too occupied wrangling her daughter to notice anything more. He asked about the other man with the Arab, and she said he was a Westerner, dressed in Western clothes and wearing sunglasses. He was looking at a paper in his hand and speaking into a mobile phone wedged between his head and shoulder. She couldn’t hear what he was saying or in what language he was saying it, because he was ten or fifteen meters away. By this time, her daughter had again run far ahead of her, and she hurried to catch up. The girl eventually stopped at a break in the wall that opened onto a branch of the Croce Viola, Milan’s emergency service. Some of the emergency responders, dressed in their bright orange uniforms, were playing with her. Rezk paused at the entrance just long enough to collect her daughter, then continued up the road. Not too long later, she heard a very loud noise behind her, so loud that she thought there must have been a car crash.
Here she paused in her narrative. Her reticence had been growing steadily, and she asked if she might nurse her baby. The officers said that was fine and recessed for half an hour, leaving her and her husband alone.
When they reconvened, an officer asked her to describe the noise she had heard. She said it was a great blow or thud. It sounded the way a car did when it ran into something, or the way a large object might if it fell from a great height and crashed on the ground. The officer asked what she did when she heard the sound, and she said she turned instinctively to look. The light-colored van that had been on the sidewalk was now in the street and heading her way very quickly. It passed her at the corner of Via Cafiero, just in front of her apartment.
The officer asked if she saw the driver.
She said she did not.
He asked if she could see whether there were passengers.
She could not.
Were there windows in the back of the van?
She couldn’t remember.
Were the windows of the cab open or closed?
She couldn’t remember.
And where were the Arab and the Westerner who had been on the sidewalk?
They were gone too. She assumed the Arab had left in the van, although willingly or not she could not say. Whatever happened, she didn’t see it. She just heard the noise.
And then?
Then she continued to her apartment, terrified, not knowing what to do or whom to tell. After a few days she confided in an Egyptian friend named Hayam, whose last name she did not know. Hayam’s husband was named Ayman, and they lived in Vermezzo, outside Milan. She had nothing more to tell.
HAYAM ABDELMONEIM MOHAMED HASSANEIN was a twenty-six-year-old immigrant from the same province in Egypt that Rezk and her husband were from. When the police found her, she was not eager to talk, but over multiple interrogations her story came out. She said that on the Friday after Abu Omar disappeared, she and her husband drove to Merfat Rezk’s apartment so Rezk could babysit their daughter while they went to the jumuah at Viale Jenner. While her husband waited in the car, Hassanein took the child inside, and it was then that Rezk told Hassanein what she had seen on Via Guerzoni. Her story to Hassanein was fuller than the one she, Rezk, would later tell p
olice. She said, among other things, that she saw at least two men inside the van, that it was a white cargo van without windows in the back, and that she heard the Westerner on the sidewalk ask in Italian for the Arab’s papers. Subsequently she heard not only the loud thud but an accompanying scream—a cry for help in Arabic. When she turned around to look, the Arab was being pulled violently into the van. He struggled, but futilely.
Hassanein returned to the car, and as her husband drove to the mosque, she told him Rezk’s story. At the end of the jumuah, when Abu Imad made his plea for information about Abu Omar, she told the story again to one of the sisters. She asked her husband after the service if she had done right, and he said yes—he too had told the story to some brothers. They drove back to Rezk’s flat, where Hassanein told her about the imam’s plea, and Rezk asked whether Hassanein had divulged her secret. Hassanein said no. She didn’t want her friend, who was disturbed enough, to worry further.
After the police asked to interview Rezk, she called Hassanein, nearly in hysterics, and said her husband Salem was irate and she was frightened of what he might do. After the interview, Salem visited Hassanein and said his wife had been very scared at the police station and had not been exact in her recollections. He related the limited story that Rezk had told the police, and he begged Hassanein not to contradict her. Hassanein agreed, and the next week, when the police questioned her, she kept her word. Two years would pass before she told investigators the full story, which meant that in 2003 the police of Milan could not say with certainty that Abu Omar had been forced into the van. It was possible, though unlikely, that he had gotten into it willingly, or he could have left in an altogether different manner.
A Kidnapping in Milan: The CIA on Trial Page 11
