WASHINGTON: The Trump administration is coming to the rescue of a CIA agent of Indian-origin who is being extradited from Portugal to Italy following a conviction for her role in kidnapping an Egyptian cleric, igniting another flashpoint in the growing rift between the United States and the European Union, Times of India has reported.
Sabrina de Sousa, who was born in Goa and grew up in Mumbai before emigrating first to Portugal and then to the U.S. (she has dual citizenship of both countries), was detained in Lisbon on Monday night, in a case that has dragged on for nearly a decade.
Portugal wants to comply with the Italian request for her extradition, following an European arrest warrant, for her alleged role in the 2003 kidnapping of an Egyptian cleric as part of a secret United States rendition program during the Bush administration.
De Sousa, who is now 60, says at the time Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr, also known as Abu Omar, was kidnapped from the streets of Milan in February 2003, she was actually on a skiing trip with her son in Northern Italy. Nasr was taken to a military base and then moved to Egypt where he was allegedly tortured even as an Italian court convicted him on terrorism-related charges.
But in 2009, another Italian court sentenced 26 Americans, including de Sousa, in absentia of kidnapping and other charges related to the abduction. Most have since been pardoned and not one has done time in prison, but a dual citizenship appears to have put Sousa in European crosshairs.
In October 2015, she was detained at Lisbon’s airport on a European arrest warrant while attempting to travel to India, where she still has family. She was later released but ordered to remain in Portugal.
On Monday, she was detained for extradition to Italy after Rome press for compliance on an European warrant, even as the Trump administration expressed disappointment and said it would intervene in the matter.
”The US government’s view is that this [conviction] was a violation of her diplomatic status,” a Senior administration official told Fox News, adding, ”We’re very concerned and following the case closely… the highest levels of our government are trying to intervene on her behalf.”
A former CIA field officer who used diplomatic cover, de Sousa sued the US State Department in 2009 seeking diplomatic immunity for her alleged role in the kidnapping. She lost the lawsuit but maintained that although she worked undercover for the CIA when the kidnapping took place, she has no role in it and was unaware of the plans.
The case will test the Trump administration’s resolve against the EU in the light of the President’s well-known skepticism of Washington’s European allies, both in the form of Nato and EU. Domestically too, the President evokes divided feeling in the intelligence community.
Earlier this week, a career CIA official seconded to the White House quit the administration saying Trump has shown he has no respect for intelligence agencies and no regard for intelligence inputs.
