Police in Panama have arrested a former US Central Intelligence Agency station chief who was convicted-in-absentia of orchestrating the kidnapping and “rendition” of an Egyptian cleric from the streets of Milan, Italy.

The Italian news agency Adnkronos quoted police in Panama as saying that Robert Seldon Lady was taken into custody near the border with Costa Rica.  Italy and Panama do not have an extradition treaty, and Panamanian authorities claim no knowledge of the detention.

The cleric, Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr was suspected of recruiting militants to fight in Iraq and was under surveillance by Italian authorities.  In 2003, the CIA seized him, threw him in a  van, and took him to the US Air Force Base at Aviano under a procedure known as “extraordinary rendition,” in which the CIA secretly detained terrorism suspects abroad and transferred them to third countries for interrogation. 

Although other American officials were pardoned or otherwise cleared of the incident, an Italian appeals court last year sentenced Lady to nine years in prison.