Who Is Sabrina De Sousa? What To Know About The Ex-CIA Spy Who Recently Fled Italy

Italian media reported Sunday that former CIA spy Sabrina De Sousa fled Italy earlier this month after CIA Director Gina Haspel and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo visited the country.

De Sousa, who holds dual U.S.-Portuguese citizenship, is connected to the 2003 CIA kidnapping of the Egyptian terrorist suspect Abu Omar, and has acted as a whistleblower in the incident.

De Sousa was one of 26 people convicted in Italy of the kidnapping and had received a four-year prison sentence.

Abu Omar was kidnapped in Milan as part of the CIA's extraordinary rendition program. De Sousa believed there was a lack of evidence to support any wrongdoing by Abu Omar. She claimed that Jeffery Castelli, then the CIA's Rome station chief, had ordered the kidnapping to boost his own career.

"Despite the circumstantial charges against me, the CIA scapegoated me to deflect attention from those who authorized the rendition and also to prevent investigations into the operation," De Sousa told Al-Jazeera in 2014.

Abu Omar, whose real name is Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, also believes that de Sousa is a scapegoat. "Sabrina and the others are scapegoats. The U.S. administration sacrificed them. All of those higher up in the hierarchy are enjoying their immunity," Omar told the Guardian in 2016. "These people higher up, without doubt they should be convicted in this case . They should face trial."

De Sousa has said that she was not in Milan during the kidnapping and that she did not help plan the operation. In 2015, she had flown to Portugal where authorities attempted to extradite her to Italy.

Although the Italian government gave her a four-year sentence, it was commuted in 2017, and she only had to do community service. De Sousa has credited the Trump administration with sparing her from jail in Italy.

"This administration has been absolutely awesome … if the Trump administration didn't say anything, didn't do anything, I'm very confident I would be in an Italian jail," she told Reuters in 2017.

De Sousa previously alleged that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton "abandoned her" because Clinton did not invoke diplomatic immunity on her behalf.

According to her Twitter profile, De Sousa currently is based out of Washington, D.C. Born in 1953 in Bombay, De Sousa became a U.S. citizen in 1985.