Scandal surrounds Romania terror escapee
By Anca Paduraru
Omar Hayssam, a Syrian-born Romanian citizen, is accused of masterminding the kidnapping in Iraq last year of three Romanian journalists. He was imprisoned last April, but released a year later for health reasons on the condition that he was not to leave Romania. Hayssam was diagnosed with colon cancer and operated on in January.
When questioned by ISN Security Watch, Romania's counterintelligence service (SRI) and intelligence agency (SIE) could provide no insight into how Hayssam managed to escape Romania or where he could now be hiding.
There is an international arrest warrant out for Hayssam.
His mysterious disappearance raises a number of questions about Romania's porous borders, rampant corruption and its relations with the US – especially at a time when the country is pursuing European integration goals.
Romania is hoping to join the EU on 1 January 2007, and it is still unclear how Hayssam's escape might affect the process.
The incident took place just as the EU Commission in its May 2006 report on Romania assessed that the Eastern European country had made progress in tackling corruption and monitoring borders as part of its Justice and Home Affairs accession file.
Domestic blame game
The blame game began in earnest after the news of Hayssam's disappearance became public on 19 July and the Court of Appeals issued a new arrest warrant for him based on his failure to appear in court on 28 June.
SRI counterintelligence officials were quick to place the responsibility for Hayssam’s disappearance on the court that released him from prison. However, neither the SRI nor the other intelligence services provided any explanations at the time as to why Hayssam had not been closely monitored after his release.
However, two days later, SRI director Radu Timofte explained that his office needed a court mandate to act, and that such a mandate had never been issued.
“The SRI is no midwife doing everybody’s job,” Timofte told the parliamentary committees for defense and national security who were questioning him on Hayssam's disappearance.
Virgil Ardelean, head of the Interior Ministry's internal investigation and intelligence unit, told the same committees that his office had warned prosecutors on two separate occasions, in May and June, that Hayssam planned to flee Romania.
But those warnings, which were sent to prosecutors with the Direction for Investigating Organized Crime and Terrorist Activities, were not heeded. Surveillance warrants were not issued, Ardelean said.
Along with Timofte and SIE Director Gheorghe Fulga, Ardelean presented his resignation to Romanian President Traian Basescu one day after the news of Hayssam’s escape became public.
Prosecutor Ciprian Nastasiu, who formed the case against Hayssam and had asked the court for his release based on a medical report issued in February by the Forensic Institute in Bucharest, has also come under fire.
“This report was fully backed by the medical authorities,” Nastasiu said in a statement to the press.
Nastasiu said the move to fire him from his position of deputy head prosecutor of the Direction for Investigating Organized Crime and Terrorist Activities was “an administrative decision,” though it occurred in the wake of Hayssam’s disappearance.
Basescu assessed that the Hayssam incident showed a lack of coordination between the country's various security authorities and was proof that a unified intelligence community was badly needed.
Basescu went on to say that he refused to nominate replacements for the directors of the intelligence services unless parliament adopted laws establishing an intelligence community.
The Romanian president's stance touched a new nerve in parliament. The legislative body had already taken issue before with the fact that the presidency promoted a set of laws establishing the intelligence community, despite the fact that the presidential office had no constitutional right to initiate such laws.
The measure did not make it through parliament.
Parliamentarians now feel once again that Basescu has exceeded his mandate, with the Parliament Permanent Bureau reminding him it was parliament's, not the president's prerogative to fire intelligence officials.
The Permanent Bureau ruled that the three men, Timofte, Fulga and Ardelean, should remain in office until the parliament in plenary session released them of their duties. All but the Democrat Party (PD) members - formerly led by Basescu - agreed to formally ask the president to abide by the Constitution.
The two opposition parties called for parliament to convene in an extraordinary session to assess the three resignations.
Social Democrat Party (PSD) leader Mircea Geoana went further, asking the president to step down, along with the ministers of justice and interior, Monica Macovei and Vasile Blaga, respectively.
Greater Romania Party (PRM) leader Corneliu Vadim Tudor said his party would take the opportunity of the extraordinary parliament session to initiate Basescu’s impeachment.
As Cristian Parvulescu, dean of the Faculty for Political Sciences in Bucharest, told ISN Security Watch: “Now it is no longer a question of the president opposing the government, but also of him directly taking on the parliament; this opened a whole new front line in Romanian domestic politics.”
A dubious affair
Information surfaced shortly after the kidnappings that Hayssam had friendly relations with certain Romanian political elite, not to mention with the father of one of the kidnapped journalists, PSD senator Vasile Ion. Those rumors prompted speculation that the kidnappings had been staged, and also led to a lukewarm response from the international media.
Journalist and political commentator Ion Cristoiu revisited the case on 31 July, alleging that the kidnapping case was staged by Romanian intelligence services with the president's blessing.
“This was to distract our attention from the real issues at hand,” Cristoiu wrote in his editorial in the Jurnalul National daily, without further elaborating.
Ovidiu Ohanesian, one of the three Romanian journalists kidnapped in Iraq in March 2005, told ISN Security Watch in a Wednesday telephone interview that he believed that “Romanian authorities plucked Hayssam out of Romania because he knew too much.”
Ohanesian alleged, though he admitted that he had no concrete proof, that the kidnapping was staged by Romanian secret services with the knowledge of the US.
“For that I have no proof, but it is the only logical explanation,” given that such a level of incompetence from the intelligence services is impossible to fathom and also that Macovei “did her best not to solve the case and not to bring back Mohammed Munaf to Romania.”
Both Hayssam and Munaf – Hayssam's alleged accomplice - lived for the past 20 years in Romania as business partners conducting operations that, according to Ohanesian, in the past had included selling arms to Iraq and fertilizer, allegedly for bomb-making.
Ohanesian has spent most of his time since his release investigating the case himself.
According to Romanian prosecutors, Munaf was responsible for financing the kidnapping of the Romanian journalists, Ohanesian, Marie-Jeanne Ion and Sorin Miscoci.
Munaf acted as a fixer and a translator for the three journalists in Iraq, and shared a cell with them and with French journalist Florence Aubenas, with the daily Liberation, who was kidnapped by the same group.
Upon the release of the three Romanians and Munaf to the Romanian anti-terrorist squad operating in Baghdad, Munaf was handed over to US authorities in Iraq, and Romanian authorities filed a request for his extradition.
The Brennen Center for Justice at NYU School of Law on Wednesday filed a federal lawsuit in Washington, DC, challenging the Executive Branch’s prolonged detention of Munaf in Iraq, without court review. Munaf and his family members fear the US will hand him over to Iraqi authorities without any court review.
“The Executive Branch does not have a blank check to imprison American citizens without due process or render them to foreign governments without judicial review,” said Jonathan Hafetz, an attorney at the Brennan Center, who is part of Munaf’s legal team.
Romania has long catered to US interests. In August 2002, Romania became one of the first countries to sign an agreement with Washington granting US citizens immunity from prosecution at the International Criminal Court (ICC). The year before, Romania signed the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA), which forfeited its right to prosecute US military personnel for crimes committed on its territory. In June this year, Romania ratified a framework agreement giving the US military access to bases on Romanian territory.
Also recently, reports have emerged alleging Romanian involvement in CIA rendition flights carrying illegally detained terror suspects. There have also been unconfirmed reports of the existence of secret CIA prisons in Romania.
The CIA rendition of prisoners from Afghanistan and Iraq was first reported in November by The Washington Post, with the humanitarian group Human Rights Watch later identifying air bases in Poland and Romania as possible locations of alleged secret prisons.
Both Polish and Romanian authorities have emphatically denied the allegations.