Abu Omar is broke, and emailing people for help.
Omar is a suspected al Qaeda operative who in 2003 was kidnapped off a street in Milan, Italy by CIA agents and secretly flown to Cairo for a hard interrogation by Egyptian security forces, overseen by a CIA official.
Now free but physically broken -- he has shown his wounds to visiting reporters -- Omar took to the Internet from Egypt last week and began e-mailing human rights organizations, the United Nations and bloggers who have written about his case, asking for financial help with bringing his family together.
I received mine last Saturday, June 21, having written extensively about the case.
(cont'd)
His fractured English was only intermittently comprehensible:
I'm Kidnapped Egyptian Abu Omar from Italy and suffering since the capture of Italy in 2003 from the absence of any material income spent it on my family, consisting of 7 members and after my release in February 2007 and now I sit in my house without work The Egyptian regime exercised Tjahi, the worst abuse of pressure . . .
Omar (his real name is Abu Omar el-Masri) wrote that his two young children have been "in Albania with their mother not be able to see for many years."
I therefore appeal to bloggers and human rights groups and the High Commissioner of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees to intervene to solve these problems before it was forced to cede cases in Italy because of the pressures that touch them.
Leo Sisti, a leading Milan-based investigative reporter, told me by e-mail that Omar "is in desperate need for money" and asking reporters to pay him for interviews.
Italian prosecutor Armando Spataro has issued a warrant for the arrest of Omar, a radical Islamist cleric in Milan when he was snatched by the CIA team. Egypt has not responded to an extradition request by Rome.
Spataro is also prosecuting 26 Americans, all but one CIA employees, on charges of kidnapping Omar. Their trial in absentia is continuing in Milan.
The Italian government has refused Spataro's request that it ask Washington for the extradition of CIA agents involved in the case.
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Comments
Any idea how he put together his email list? Maybe he is going to start a blog...
Posted by: JDinges
| June 30, 2008 6:31 PM
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