Panama: Former Spy Returns to U.S.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/20/world/americas/panama-former-spy-returns-to-us.html

Version 0 of 1.

A former Central Intelligence Agency officer who was detained in Panama on Thursday in connection with a criminal conviction in Italy was released and flew to the United States on Friday, American officials said. Italy’s justice minister, Anna Maria Cancellieri, protested, saying in a statement that Italy’s request for the extradition of the former C.I.A. officer, Robert Seldon Lady, based on an Interpol warrant, “has been disregarded without plausible explanations.” Mr. Lady is a former chief of the agency’s station in Milan, and one of 26 agency employees and contractors charged in the 2003 abduction in Milan of a radical Muslim cleric, Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, also known as Abu Omar. The cleric was taken to Egypt, where, he said, he was tortured, and the case fueled a public debate over the American practice of extraordinary rendition.