Ex-CIA officer faces extradition to Italy after final appeal rejected

Sabrina de Sousa told the Associated Press on Wednesday she was waiting to be told when she would be taken to Italy, where she was convicted in absentia and has a four-year sentence to serve.

Since her arrest in Lisbon in October on a European arrest warrant, De Sousa has lost her extradition fight at a lower Lisbon court and her appeal against that decision to the Portuguese supreme court.

De Sousa was among 26 Americans convicted for the 2003 kidnapping of an Egyptian cleric, Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr, in Milan, when she was working in the country under diplomatic cover. She insists she was not involved in the abduction.

The constitutional court said in a ruling posted on its website late on Tuesday that De Sousa’s appeal was rejected.

Under Portuguese legal procedure, the constitutional court will sends its decision back to the lower court. That court then informs the police, who set in motion the extradition process in conjunction with Italian authorities.

De Sousa said in an email to AP that she had no idea when she might be sent to Italy.

Her Italian lawyer has previously said he was hopeful of obtaining clemency from Italy’s head of state in the case, which has also implicated Italy’s secret services and proven embarrassing to successive Italian governments. President Sergio Mattarella has granted clemency to other defendants convicted in the case.

De Sousa said she sent a letter to Pope Francis on Wednesday, through the Vatican’s embassy in Lisbon, urging him to speak out against the extraordinary renditions used by the CIA after the 11 September 2001 terror attacks. The pontiff has already condemned the practice in a 2014 speech.

De Sousa, who has both US and Portuguese citizenship and was working in Italy under diplomatic cover, argues that she was never officially informed of the Italian court conviction and could not use confidential US government information to defend herself.

"I was never notified nor was I allowed to defend myself because of secrecy obligations,” she wrote in the letter to the pope. "The absence of due process and the imposition of various versions of state secrets are obstacles that prevent the many unanswered questions about the premise and justification for Abu Omar’s rendition.”

The rendition programme, under which terror suspects were kidnapped and transferred to centres where they were interrogated and tortured, was part of the anti-terrorism strategy of the US administration following the attacks. President Barack Obama ended the programme years later.