Talaat Fouad Qassem

(4th post in a series on the House GOP's attempt to legalize "Extraordinary Rendition". Links: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12.)

(a.k.a. Talat Fouad Qassem, Abu Talal Al-Qasimy, Talat Fouad Kasem).

Summary
This is the first case I have found of extraordinary rendition.* Qassem was arrested in Zagreb, Croatia. U.S. officials questioned him for two days on a ship in the Adriatic Sea, focusing on an alleged assassination plot against President Clinton. Then they sent him to Egypt, where he had been sentenced to death in absentia by a military tribunal in 1992.

There is some question about the date when this took place. The Washington Post has reported that it happened in 1998, but the four other sources I’ve found (a 1995 Toronto Star article, a 2001 Boston Globe article, and two 2000 articles in the Arab press) say it was 1995, and I believe that is the correct date.

According to Islamic militant sources in Egypt, Egypt took Qassem to their intelligence headquarters in al-Mansoura, then moved him to Cairo in October 1995. He has not been seen since. Egypt has refused to comment on his whereabouts or on whether he is dead or alive.

His wife believes that they executed him several years ago.

*this is actually one of those grey area cases between rendition and extradition—Egypt had charges against him. They had imprisoned him for seven years in the past before his suspected role in the plot against Anwar Sadat before he escaped from prison, and had tried to get Pakistan to extradite him in 1992, so these were not charges made only at the request of the U.S.

Sources
1. Anthony Shadid, “America Prepares the War on Terror; US, Egypt Raids Caught Militants,” Boston Globe, October 7, 2001.

Excerpt:

Qassem, a fiery 38-year-old militant, was from a region of southern Egypt that has given rise to some of the country's most dangerous Islamists, and his record reads like an Islamist version of a soldier of fortune.

In 1982, he was jailed for seven years in Egypt, suspected of a role in the assassination of Anwar Sadat. He escaped during a prison transfer in 1989, and the odyssey that followed bore the hallmarks of a more infamous fellow traveler, Osama bin Laden. Like the Saudi exile, Qassem spent time in Pakistan, then joined the ranks of the Afghan mujahideen, who were fighting Soviet troops in the 1980s as part of one of the most extensive US covert efforts ever.

Those fighters from the Arab world became a kind of military reserve.

"Some have died in battle," he told an Egyptian human rights activist in 1993 in an interview published in Middle East Report, a Washington-based journal. "Others are being kept in Afghanistan to be sent, when the time is ripe, to Egypt. Some have already been sent and are under the leadership of military units."

By the early 1990s, he had emerged as a key leader and spokesman of al-Gamaa al-Islamiya, or the Islamic Group, which waged a bloody 10-year battle against an Egyptian government it believed was infidel because it failed to rule by strict Islamic law. Over those years, Qassem, whose nom de guerre was Abu Talal, was acquainted with a who's who of militant Islam, including Mohammed al-Islambuli, the brother of Sadat's assassin, and Ayman al-Zawahiri, considered by many intelligence officials to be the number two in bin Laden's growing network.

An Egyptian court sentenced Qassem to death in absentia in 1992 and pressured Pakistan, where he operated, to extradite him. He stayed one step ahead. He fled to Denmark, where he received asylum and soon took on a very visible presence as a preacher. His sermons at a Copenhagen mosque drew thousands, and he even appeared on a local television station on Saturdays.

Then he blundered.

Traveling under the name Ibrahim Izzat, he left for the Balkans, arriving in Croatia on Sept. 12, 1995, en route to Bosnia, where - his supporters said - he planned to write about the war there. He traveled with a translator, Ahmed al-Abd, who was living in Zagreb.

Qassem's time there was short.

Croatian police seized him from a Zagreb apartment the next day, jailed him, then ordered him deported six days later for not registering with police upon his arrival, said Sirri, the Islamic activist, during a telephone interview from London.

It was the last his translator would see of him and, according to Croatian authorities at the time, their last knowledge of his whereabouts.

A former US official acknowledges now that was where US agents stepped in, spiriting him out of Croatia. Sirri, quoting sympathetic Egyptian sources, said he was questioned by US intelligence for two days aboard a US ship in the Adriatic Sea, specifically on reported threats that the Islamic Group planned to assassinate President Clinton. (US officials had frozen Qassem's assets by executive order in 1995.) The US official confirmed that he was then turned over to Egyptian authorities. Sirri put the date of the hand-over at Sept. 22. Egyptian authorities have consistently refused to comment on his case, even to say whether he is dead or alive. Islamic activists at the time, however, said he was then taken to intelligence headquarters in the Nile delta town of al-Mansoura, and subsequently transferred to Cairo in early October 1995.

His wife, who was pregnant when he disappeared, said at the time that she believed he was killed.

"That was a very effective operation," the US official says.

2. Rajiv Chandrasekaran and Peter Finn, "U.S. Behind Secret Transfer of Terror Suspects," Washington Post Foreign Service, March 11, 2002.

Excerpt:

In 1998, U.S. agents spirited Talaat Fouad Qassem, 38, a reputed leader of the Islamic Group, an Egyptian extremist organization, to Egypt after he was picked up in Croatia while traveling to Bosnia from Denmark, where he had been granted political asylum. Qassem was allegedly an associate of Ayman Zawahiri, the number-two man in Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network. Egyptian lawyers said he was questioned aboard a U.S. ship off the Croatian coast before being taken to Cairo, where a military tribunal had already sentenced him to death in absentia. Egyptian officials have refused to discuss his case.

3. Emad Mekay, "Cry of a Beloved Wife," Islam-Online.net, September 26, 2000.

Excerpt:

The wife of a leading Egyptian Islamist, Talaat Fouad Kasem, who is believed to have been kidnapped by Egyptian authorities five years ago in Croatia, has appealed to Croatian authorities to help determine her husband's whereabouts.

In a letter addressed to Croatian President Stepan Mesic, and obtained by Islam Online, Amany Mahran called on the Croatian president to help her "in finding out the fate of my beloved husband and the truth about the kidnapping."

"In the past five years, my family and I had knocked [on] every door. There are many states and hidden powers trying to kill the truth and stop our efforts to find that truth," said Mahran in a letter obtained through her lawyer in Egypt, Muntassier al-Zayat.

4. "Wife of Egyptian Prominent Fundamentalist Asks Croatia to Reveal His Destiny," ArabicNews.com, September 15, 2000.

(Covers the same letter as above.)

5. "World Briefs," Toronto Sun, October 22, 1995.

Excerpt:

SET BLAST, EGYPTIANS CLAIM
CAIRO (AP) - Egypt's biggest Islamic militant group claimed responsibility yesterday for a car bomb in Croatia that killed the driver and wounded 29 people. The Islamic Group said Friday's attack was to avenge the arrest last month of Talaat Fouad Qassem, an exiled leader reportedly held in Croatia. A handwritten statement faxed to a Western news agency in Cairo warned of further attacks.

Comments

[carsick]

This case seems fairly clear unless you are focusing on America's practice of picking people up in foreign countries.
One of our allies had a warrant for his arrest. We questioned him on another matter and assumingly got enough information from him to release him to our ally.
Our country currently supports the death penalty so we recognize extradition requests from other countries that also have the death penalty.
Yes it wasn't officially extradition if he wasn't on US soil but the circumstances don't seem so radically different.
If the question comes down to "Did we have the legal right to grab him in the first place?" then I think we don't have enough information.
Explicit but clandestine permission may have been given. Otherwise, we could also defend our actions by claiming national defense interests and the after-the-action analysis would probably pass the "global test".

Of course, I'm no lawyer.

[Katherine]

I agree that this is a very, very different situation from Arar's case, and sounds more like an extradition than a rendition in many ways, but it's treated as the first "rendition" in articles and I don't know anything about our extradition law or policies.

I don't necessarily think we should never send suspects to Egypt when they're wanted for terrorism and murder there.

Judging by the few cases we know about, rendition started out as something a lot more defensible than what it's become. I am saving commentary on this until the end.

[Katherine]

Article 3 of the Convention Against Torture is also relevant:

"No State Party shall expel, return ("refouler") or extradite a person to another State where there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture.
For the purpose of determining whether there are such grounds, the competent authorities shall take into account all relevant considerations including, where applicable, the existence in the State concerned of a consistent pattern of gross, flagrant or mass violations of human rights."

You could argue that there are "substantial grounds" for believing that any suspect returned to Egypt without some sort of oversight will be tortured, based on their human rights record. However:
1) U.S. law interprets "substantial grounds" as meaning that it is more likely than not that the person will be tortured, so perhaps that's not true in every case and not true in this case.
2) You could argue that they wouldn't bother torturing him because they planned to execute him. I bet they'd want any intelligence he had first, though.

My guess is that there were big problems with his "trial"--Egypt has a tendency towards show trials and trials in absentia are not usually genuine trials, I would guess. I don't know whether our extradition treaty with Egypt, or our extradition agreements in general, take a position on extraditing someone to a place where he will probably be executed without a real trial. (I assume we don't require full compliance with U.S. standards of due process, but there may be some minimum standard or there may not. I've no idea.)

[carsick]

It could also be a bit like the Kahn case. We simply didn't want to put the screws on Egypt over a guy they had already sentenced to death.
The minimum standard is probably flexible depending upon the nature of our alliance and the country's perceived strategic value.
Egypt is our veddy veddy good friend.

[carsick]

Sorry. Like the Kahn case in the sense we valued the relationship with the country more than any differences we could bring up about the individual.

[carsick]

One quick question. If he was wanted for escape as well as his original conviction as well as his conviction in abstentia aren't there multiple reasons he's a fugitive from justice (and multiple convictions and courts) that would qualify his case as a rendition case?

Now if it was Nelson Mandella who escaped...

[Saheli]

This is an extremely admirable project of yours, and I look forward to reading all the future entries. Summarizing what's known is an inadaquately glorified practice. Thanks so much.