After all the legal challenges, all the declarations by people involved that she is not guilty of anything other than being in the wrong place at the wrong time, the wheels of a justice system that seems to deliver everything upside down have finally turned the final circle: Sabrina de Sousa, 61, was arrested yesterday in Lisbon and taken to Tires jail.
From Tires she will be transferred to Porto, reports Correio da Manhã this morning, where the logistics of her extradition to Italy to serve a four-year sentence imposed ‘in absentia’ over 10 years ago are confirmed with Italian police through Interpol.
This has been a mammoth judicial fight since de Sousa was detained in Lisbon two years ago, purportedly exhausted with ‘living in the shadow’ of a European Arrest Warrant (click here).
Every one of the other former CIA operatives condemned by an Italian court with her have remained out of the spotlight by simply not travelling to Europe.
But Sabrina’s Portuguese connections meant that by staying away, she was losing time with loved ones.
Thus the decision to ‘come back and face the music’ – any way it went.
De Sousa, backed by Euro MP Ana Gomes, supported by Trump intelligence aide Pete Hoekstra (click here) and even described by her so-called victim of an illegal ‘kidnapping’ – radical Muslim cleric Abu Omar – as a scapegoat, has always said she would be prepared to face jail rather than spend her life in hiding.
CM suggests the former intelligence officer may end up serving her sentence doing social work (a bit like the case of Italy’s former prime minister Sílvio Berlusconi), or she could still “benefit from a presidential pardon”. Quite which president remains unexplained.
