A Kidnapping in Milan: The CIA on Trial

by Hendricks, Steve

  After the bus had driven for some minutes, one of his chaperons said, “Do you know where you are going?”

  “To the airport,” Abu Omar said. “Back to Italy. Home.”

  The chaperon said nothing.

  After forty-five minutes, the bus stopped and Abu Omar was ordered out. He did not hear airplanes or other sounds one would associate with airports. He was led into a building and shoved roughly forward to a room, where he was set upon by many fists, boots, and curses. It was his welcome, he soon understood, to the Tora Prison complex, south of Cairo. The prisons of Tora run from a lightly secured farm camp to the most fortified prison in the nation. The latter, run by the State Security Service, is known as al-Aqrab, the Scorpion. It was apparently to the Scorpion that Abu Omar had been brought. When his hosts were done with their violent greeting, they sat him bleeding in a chair and asked his full name, age, job, and other basic personal information, apparently for the prison’s records. Even torture has its bureaucracy. Then he was taken through several hallways and down stairs to a cell well below ground. One of the guards opened the door and said Abu Omar had come to a place where nobody could find him, a place lost to the world.

  “Here, the flies don’t even come,” the guard said.

  He told Abu Omar he must never remove his blindfold, even in his cell. If he tried, he would get a “torture party.” They would be watching. Abu Omar asked to know the qiblah, the direction of Mecca, toward which a Muslim must face during prayer, but the guard would not tell him. He asked where the lavatory was, and the guard took off the blindfold for a moment and said, “You’re in the lavatory.” Abu Omar saw before him a bowl of dirty water and, for his evacuations, a small hole whose stench he had already smelled. The cell had no light and only the tiniest of ventilation shafts, which accounted for the sodden weight of the air. It was no bigger than his last cell—two steps in any direction exhausted it. There was no bed, only a sheet of cardboard and a thin blanket.

  The guard said that whenever Abu Omar heard a key in his door, he must go immediately to the wall opposite and kneel with both hands against it. If he failed to do so before a guard entered, he would be educated with a cattle prod. He also said that Abu Omar’s name was now 27, the number of his cell. If Abu Omar failed to answer to 27, he would be educated with the prod. He would also, although the guard did not then say so, learn to answer to Whore, Cunt, and Anus, also on penalty of electrical education.

  The guard shut him inside and left him alone. His despair, after his expectation of freedom, was thorough. He tried to console himself with the thought that maybe they would not treat him quite so badly here, but they soon rid him of that idea. At Tora he was to have two interrogations a day, as opposed to the one every few days at the previous prison. The first session ran from late morning until late afternoon, the second from night until nearly dawn. He was introduced to new tortures. In one, he was strapped naked to an iron grate through which electricity was shot, which added to the usual electrical agony a feeling like being seared on a griddle. Sometimes the effect was enhanced by throwing water on him. In another torture, his tormentors lay him on a water-soaked mattress and set a wooden chair over his chest and another chair over his thighs. Two brutes would sit on the chairs to weigh them down, electricity would be sent through the mattress, and Abu Omar’s body would leap up and crash into the crossbars of the chairs, which kept him in contact with the current. At other times, he was electrocuted through clamps attached to his nipples or penis or through a kind of wire hat placed on his head, which left his thinking muddled for days. In another torture, he was hung on a door in a crucifix-like position and battered with cables and clubs all over his body, his genitals not excepted. In another, they draped him over a trapeze, hands and ankles bound together, and beat him all over. “Let Italy help you,” they said when he cried for mercy. During one session, he was thrown face-first to the floor, naked and with his hands tied behind his back. A guard dropped his pants and mounted him as if for rape. Abu Omar screamed hysterically before passing out and did not know if the rape had been completed. The same thing happened another time.

  There was no respite in his cell. Whereas in his previous prison the torture chamber had been far from his closet, here it was nearby, and he could hear the screams of other victims day and night. The impotent listening was as bad as being tortured himself.

  After some time, he feared he was going mad—a prospect that frightened him more than death. Death would at least bring peace. In his desperation he opened the slot in his door and asked a guard if he could have a copy of the Quran. He would not have been able to read it, there being no light to read by, but he wanted to hold it and kiss it, if only for a few seconds. He got a beating instead. His tortures grew more severe, he assumed because his keepers were angered that he had the strength to ask for sustenance.

  The severity had its effect. Life and pain became inseparable to him. He could not remember what happiness felt like and could not imagine feeling it again. Nor could he imagine his captors would let him go after all they had done to him. He supposed if he were fortunate, he would be killed, but he could also be kept like this for years, maybe decades. He wanted only to die, and resolved to kill himself. It was a sin against God to take one’s life for no purpose, but he reasoned that he was already in his coffin and was only helping close the lid. He lacked a tool with which to do the job. After some thought, to the extent his addled brain permitted thought, he settled on hurling himself headlong into a wall. He put his back against one side of the cell and burst toward the opposite side, but there was no ground on which to get up speed and the collision only temporarily deprived him of consciousness. Sometime later he tried again but with the same result. His defeat was now total. He was one of the living dead.

  Chapter 6

  Inquest

  SAFAR, THE SECOND MONTH of the Islamic calendar, is the year’s most inauspicious. It is usually translated “the void month,” perhaps because early Arabs left their houses void, or safr, at that time of year to raid their enemies. Alternatively, Safar may have been so named because an early Safar fell in autumn—Islam’s calendar is lunar, and the months migrate from season to season—when leaves turn yellow, or sufr, and fall from trees. God cast Adam and Eve from Eden in Safar.

  In the late afternoon of 28 Safar 1425 or, Gregorianly, 19 April 2004, Hitham Nasr, a pious chemical engineer, received a call from the State Security Service in Alexandria. The caller said Hitham’s elder brother Osama was at the service’s local headquarters and Hitham should come get him immediately.

  “Just don’t ask what happened,” the caller said.

  Hitham gathered his brother-in-law Magdi and hurried to the office, but Abu Omar was not released to them, and after some time they went home.

  In the small hours of the next morning, the security service called again, this time at the home of Magdi and his wife, Abu Omar’s sister Rawya.

  “If you don’t come now,” the man on the phone said, “you’ll never see him again.”

  Magdi gathered Hitham and again they hurried to the office. They were shown to a dirty waiting room where sat a bony, disheveled man with a wildly unkempt beard which, as Abu Omar would later say, made him look like Saddam Hussein after his capture. Magdi and Hitham hardly recognized their brother. Safar, however, would not be a void month after all.

  AT TEN MINUTES before six on the evening after Abu Omar was released, the counterterrorists of Milan recorded a brief conversation between Mohammed Reda Elbadry, a teacher and lay imam at the mosque on Via Quaranta, and his daughter.

  “Hello, Daddy,” she said. “Abu Omar is in Egypt.”

  “Huh? What?”

  “Uncle Abu Omar is in Egypt.”

  “Who?”

  “Uncle Abu Omar.”

  “Who told you?”

  “He called Aunt Nabila himself and told her he’s staying with his family.”

  “He did?”

  “Yes. She is supposed to
call him back any minute.”

  Half an hour later, from the phone in the flat on Via Conte Verde, Nabila Ghali called her sister-in-law’s in Alexandria.

  “May peace be with you,” a nearly forgotten voice greeted her.

  “How are you?” she said to her husband.

  “I’m fine, praise God.”

  “You’re fine?”

  “I’m fine, I’m fine.”

  “Really?”

  “I swear! They brought me food every day.”

  “Really?”

  “Sure. They brought me food from the fanciest restaurant.”

  “Praise God,” she said, not understanding his irony.

  He said he had much to tell about his last fourteen months, but he did not want to tell it over the Conte Verde phone. He would tell her another time on another phone. He asked if the police had come to their flat, and she said they had shortly after his kidnapping. They had wanted to see if anything in the apartment might offer a clue to his disappearance.

  “Did they touch anything?” he said.

  “Everything is in its place!”

  “Look, did they take the computer?”

  “No. Are you well?”

  “Did they take the computer?”

  “No.”

  “So tell me what they took then?!”

  “They just took your papers, that’s all!”

  “They didn’t take the computer?”

  “No, they took your papers and the lessons you hold over the Internet.”

  “Is the computer still there? Is it?”

  “Yes, it’s all in its place!”

  She asked if she could join him in Egypt, and he said if she did, the Egyptians might not let her leave. He himself was not allowed to travel beyond Alexandria. He told her he had arranged for one of the brothers in Milan to visit her soon and she should give him two hundred euros, which he would forward to Abu Omar. He also told her to call his first wife and children in Albania and let them know he was alive. She assented and said she was worried he would be imprisoned again.

  “Look,” he said, “there are no problems for me. There won’t be a second kidnapping… . They told me, ‘We are the ones who lost. You didn’t lose. We are the losers!’ ”

  “Alright,” she said, although she had no idea what he meant.

  “Listen, they warned me that reporters from all Europe will come looking for you. You must meet nobody. I must stress this, no journalists. That is what they said.”

  “Rest assured, I’ll meet no one.”

  “Neither press nor TV!”

  “Sure, sure.”

  “Do not speak with any channel.”

  “Nobody, nobody.”

  HUSBAND AND WIFE spoke again two weeks later, and it was evident that in between the two talks, they had spoken on an untapped phone and Ghali had decided to join him in Egypt. He told her what to do before she left: leave the decorations on the walls of the apartment, ask some of the brothers if they wanted the refrigerator or washing machine, give the furniture to the mosque on Viale Jenner, sell the computer, clean the place. A few days later, they talked again.

  “Are you more at peace now?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he said. “Well, I was very edgy at first, but not anymore. I don’t think about death anymore. I was very close to dying. Now more than ever I need you by my side to pursue the path that leads me to God. I don’t care about anything in this life anymore. I just care to lead an Islamic life. I am deeply saddened because I wasn’t able to do what I had planned to do in Italy. I think I did something but not what I hoped to do. If God wills it, I’ll do it here.”

  His choice of words, in Arabic, and other contexts suggested that “what I hoped to do” referred to fulfilling the Islamic duty, more propagandistic than violent, to spread the word of God.

  He also spoke during this period with Mohammed Reda Elbadry, the teacher at Via Quaranta, who said during one of their talks, “We are arranging a handsome sum of money for you, if God wills it.”

  “What’s that?” said Abu Omar, perhaps not hearing or perhaps wishing to know the sum with more precision.

  “We are arranging a handsome sum of money for you.”

  “God bless you.”

  “If God wills it, the price of a house.”

  “God bless you.”

  The two men had spoken at other times on untapped phones, and it soon became clear to the listeners of DIGOS that they had discussed the kidnapping. Abu Omar was careful to avoid saying much over Elbadry’s present phone, which he evidently thought likely to be tapped, but at one moment he forgot himself and blurted, “They took me straight to a military base, and there they put me on board a military plane.” Then he stopped and changed the topic. Few as the words were, they were the first the police had heard about what happened to Abu Omar after Merfat Rezk saw him standing with the Westerner beside the van. That Elbadry might know more details was promising. He did not, however, seem disposed to share them with police.

  “Every time we went to report things,” Elbadry said to Abu Omar, “they didn’t believe it, and they said they know nothing about you and that they started an investigation and that an eyewitness saw you—”

  “I saw her. She lives in the next street.”

  “This woman—they put pressure on her husband, and he changed his statement after ten days.”

  “Is that right?”

  “Yes, they put pressure on her husband. They told him he would have been deported, arrested, and confined to Egypt for the rest of his life.” (There is no evidence to substantiate the claim.)

  “Right, right.”

  “I told them”—the police—“these very words: I said, ‘This is not your style of kidnapping, this is the way Americans do things.’ ”

  “Yes.”

  “ ‘And you are allies of the Americans, and we accuse you because this man had refugee status and was under your protection, and you failed to protect him. So your responsibility is great.’ ”

  Elbadry did not tell the police that he had spoken with the missing man, nor did Nabila Ghali.

  A MONTH OR TWO before Abu Omar was released, his tortures at Tora Prison had eased somewhat. It had been a mystery to him why. He could perceive no reason things should have changed. But not long after this easing, he was taken from his cell and led upstairs and outside for the first time in several months and was put aboard a microbus that took him to an office of the State Security Service in central Cairo. There an officer told him he was about to have a hearing before a judge.

  Odd though it might seem that a prisoner of his sort should have his day in court, it was not unheard of. Egyptian judges, unlike their counterparts in other Arab nations, had a modicum of autonomy from their autocratic executive—at least in civil, as opposed to military, courts. Civil judges sometimes ordered Egypt’s security services to release political prisoners, and sometimes the services obeyed.

  The officer told Abu Omar that when he was asked in court about his journey to Egypt, he was to say that he had bought a ticket on EgyptAir, flown from Milan to Cairo of his own will, and surrendered himself to the airport security service on arrival. The officer struck him a few times to impress him with the importance of testifying thus and promised worse to come if he did not do as told. Taken to court, Abu Omar did as told. He had hoped his feral appearance and wounds on his face would prompt the judge or the state’s attorney to ask about his treatment—his father had been a state’s attorney, after all—but they evidently had seen it all before and asked nothing of the kind. He was returned to Tora.

  Some days or weeks passed, then he was driven into town for another hearing and given the same instructions about how to testify. He appeared in court, testified as ordered, and was returned to his cell. Once or twice more, it seems, the routine was repeated. Then came a day in mid-April when he was taken from his cell again but was driven to Alexandria instead of to Cairo. There, to his astonishment, a State Security officer said the cour
t had ruled there were no valid charges against him and he had to be released. If Abu Omar wished to keep his freedom, however, he must follow a set of rules called the “Sacred Don’ts”:

  Don’t visit the mosques of Gamaa.

  Don’t preach in any mosque.

  Don’t contact anyone in Europe.

  Don’t go near the Italian embassy or consulate.

  Don’t travel beyond Alexandria without the government’s permission.

  Don’t contact human rights groups.

  Don’t tell anyone what happened.

  Abu Omar feared a trick. Maybe the officer was only saying he would be released to see if he would betray some sliver of information he hadn’t already given a hundred times. But not long after being read the Sacred Don’ts, his brother and brother-in-law stood before him, and that night he slept on a mattress in a bed unmolested by vermin. It was voluptuous.

  Why the government let him go rather than bring other charges against him is not clear. Perhaps his release was a result of the latest nonviolence accord that Mubarak and Gamaa had reached only months earlier. More than a thousand Gamaa members had been released from prison, and maybe Abu Omar amounted to just one more. Whatever the case, the government apparently believed he posed little threat.

  His liberty did not instantly revivify him. He could walk no more than a few yards without gasping for air, his joints ached even when sitting, he had little control over his bladder, and he was slow to regain even a few of the forty pounds he had lost in prison. Panic seized him throughout the day. During the night, every night, he woke up screaming.

  He found a measure of relief in talking, but it was not enough to talk with his family in Egypt, and he continued to call Milan, heedless of the Sacred Don’ts. Two and a half weeks after his release, an officer of the State Security Service called him and said the service had decided to issue him identification papers, till then withheld as a way of restricting his movements. He should come pick them up at the service’s local headquarters, the same from which he had been discharged. A disturbed Abu Omar told his wife on the phone that night that he feared he would be rearrested when he went. On May 13 he went and did not come back. His emancipation had lasted twenty-three days.