Returnees from Albania

The case of the Returnees from Albania was a massive criminal trial in an Egyptian military court from February to April 1999. The trial is one of the principal sources of information about Sunni terrorist groups in the 1990s, especially al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya and its offshoot Egyptian Islamic Jihad.

The largest trial in Egypt since the 1981 trials surrounding the assassination of President Anwar Sadat, it was a landmark case in the topics of extraordinary rendition and the credibility of the testimony of terrorism detainees.

The local Egyptian press coined the phrase "Returnees from Albania" to describe the defendants, in reference to the American-backed extraordinary rendition which saw suspects kidnapped from foreign locations and secretly brought back to Egypt to face trial. In actuality, 43 men were brought from Albania, Azerbaijan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Yemen, and an additional 64 were tried in absentia.

The prosecution leaned heavily on the testimony of defendant Ahmad Ibrahim al-Sayyid al-Naggar, who was the first arrested. Many of the statements and confessions have been obtained through torture.

Those documents speak of "the Muslim group" or "the Muslim organization", meaning al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya as it was at that time. Most of al-Gama'a later renounced violence, but a violent residue called Islamic Jihad remained; that group was later known as Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ) to distinguish it from Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The remnants of EIJ and at least one person in the violent fugitive component of Gama'a (namely Mohammad Hasan Khalil al-Hakim) have since merged with al-Qaeda.

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Wikipedia