A Kidnapping in Milan: The CIA on Trial (12 page)

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 police. 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.

The police never saw Rezk again. The day after they questioned her, she and her children returned to Egypt.

IN ITALY
criminal investigations are conducted by a magistrate, in whose person is combined the roles of prosecutor and chief investigator. This arrangement differs from that of the United States, where the roles are separated: an American prosecutor may advise the police, but he does not direct them. Stefano Dambruoso began his magisterial career in the early 1990s prosecuting Mafiosi in the Sicilian city of Agrigento, which was a bit like running an anti-gang squad in East Los Angeles. After some success, he received a gift box containing half a pig’s head. The chief of police got the other half. The Mafia, who do not deal in subtlety, were threatening death. Dambruoso stayed three more years and put more mobsters away. In 1996 he transferred to Milan and became the city’s sole prosecutor detailed full-time to Islamic terrorism. Milan was a generally safer posting than Agrigento, although on one occasion police overheard terrorists speaking of “guys from Japan”—meaning kamikazes, suicide bombers—who seemed to be planning to assassinate Dambruoso. Two guards with submachine guns were stationed outside his apartment, and three bodyguards traveled with him until the threat dissipated.

Dambruoso convicted many terrorists, but a frustration of his work was that he rarely convicted them of terrorism per se because in the absence of an attack, conspiracy to commit a specific terrorist act could be hard to prove. Usually he convicted for ancillary crimes like forgery and illegal immigration, which carried lamentably short sentences—two or four or seven years, say. None of the terrorists of Abu Saleh’s cell or those arrested in Operation Sphinx was sentenced to more than a decade, and several beat the immigration and forgery raps entirely. Italy would somewhat solve this problem after September 11 by criminalizing witting association with terrorists, which was much easier to prove than terrorism proper. But the sentences for associational terrorism could also have been stiffened, and as a fallback, Italy took to deporting terrorists after their sentences had run. The terrorists about to be deported, men who, given a little more opportunity, would have murdered Italians by the dozen, often made touching pleas to their hosts not to return them to the lash of their native governments.

Dambruoso had directed DIGOS’s surveillance of Abu Omar, so the investigation into his disappearance fell to him as well. After Rezk’s interview with the police, he sent investigators to question the twelve members of the Croce Viola who had been on duty on February 17, but none had seen or heard a thing. He also sent investigators to ask Abu Omar’s associates in Milan, Varese, Como, and Cremona whether he had talked of leaving town, but none had heard him say anything of the kind. One administrator at Via Quaranta reported that Abu Omar’s wife had once said that Abu Omar thought he was followed on trips to mosques in Gallarate and Varese. His followers had driven either a car or a white Fiat Fiorino, which is a hybrid between a car and a van. Dambruoso did not know whether Abu Omar had imagined the surveillance, or had spotted the police who sometimes followed him, or had spotted someone else, perhaps his kidnappers. Dambruoso maintained the tap on the phone in Abu Omar’s apartment, but the calls Nabila Ghali made and received revealed nothing of interest, and bugs of Abu Omar’s associates revealed nothing either. The tap on Abu Omar’s mobile phone, silent since the morning of his disappearance, remained so.

Because Rezk had said that the Westerner standing with Abu Omar on the sidewalk had been using a mobile phone, Dambruoso asked the phone companies with nearby cell towers for logs of the calls routed by the towers between 11:00
A.M
. and 1:00
P.M.
on February 17. The logs would not contain the actual conversations, but they would show which phones had been used in the area, from which Dambruoso hoped to learn something useful. Italian bureaucracy, however, be it public or private, moves grudgingly, and half a year passed before the logs arrived. When they did, Dambruoso discovered he had erroneously requested them for 17.03.03—March 17—instead of 17.02.03. He corrected the digit, re-requested the logs, and awaited the new ones.

He had only one other clue of note. On March 3, two weeks after Abu Omar disappeared, Italy’s Central Directorate for Anti-Terrorism Police, the body that coordinates DIGOS offices around the country, received a brief teletype from the CIA. It was labeled secret//release to italy only and read in full: