De Sousa granted partial pardon (2)

(ANSA) - Ferrara, March 1 - Former CIA agent Sabrina De Sousa, who had been sentenced to four years in prison for involvement in the kidnapping of former Milan imam Hassan Mustafa Omar Nasr in 2003 was granted partial clemency late Tuesday and went free Wednesday instead of being extradited to Italy.
    She and her lawyer were informed by the Milan prosecutor's officer on Wednesday morning that all European arrest warrants against her had been revoked by Rome. The warrants date back to July 10, 2015.
    De Sousa was on Wednesday to have been handed over from the Portuguese authorities to their Italian counterparts. Her lawyer, Dario Bolognesi, said that De Sousa was free but remained under a suspended sentence. He said that legal action would be taken to remove the sentence entirely.
    Sousa would have been the only one of more than 20 Americans, most of them CIA operatives, who were convicted in Nasr's extraordinary rendition to Egypt, where he was tortured.
    The case of Nasr, an Islamist probed for recruiting jihadis, was the world's first judicial examination of the controversial US practice of rendition.