SCOTLAND: Scotland’s justice secretary, Angela Constance, has officially approved the extradition of American fugitive Nicholas Rossi to proceed.
Last week, Constance signed the extradition order following a court’s ruling in August that there was no legal obstacle to Rossi’s return to the United States to face rape charges.
Nicholas Rossi was apprehended in December 2021 in the COVID ward of a Glasgow hospital. The 36-year-old has since asserted that he is a victim of mistaken identity. The convicted sex offender, originally from Rhode Island, has claimed to be an Irish orphan named Arthur Knight.
In November of last year, Sheriff Norman McFadyen made a decisive ruling, affirming that he was indeed Rossi and not the persona he had repeatedly claimed, Arthur Knight. The Edinburgh Sheriff Court heard that Rossi’s fingerprints and distinctive tattoos provided conclusive evidence of his true identity.
Despite the ruling, Nicholas Rossi continued to assert that he was a victim of mistaken identity and claimed that someone had tattooed him while he was unconscious in the hospital in an attempt to frame him. He returned to court for his extradition hearing in June of this year.
US authorities have reported that Nicholas Rossi was known to use multiple aliases, including Nicholas Alahverdian. In his extradition ruling, Sheriff McFadyen characterised Rossi as “dishonest and deceitful, as he is evasive and manipulative”.
Bovey urged the court either to reject the extradition request or postpone proceedings for a more thorough examination of Rossi’s mental health.
However, three medical experts testified that Rossi did not exhibit signs of acute mental illness, and a GP at Saughton expressed doubts about his overall health.
In August, the sheriff ruled that extradition to Utah was legally permissible, with the final decision resting with the justice secretary.
Nicholas Rossi has a two-week window to file an appeal against the decision. Separately, detectives in Essex are seeking to interview Rossi regarding an allegation of rape from 2017.
In December 2019, he informed the media in his hometown that he was suffering from late-stage non-Hodgkin lymphoma and had just weeks to live. Rhode Island news outlets even reported his death in February 2020.
However, in a surprising turn of events less than two years later, Rossi, who was the subject of an Interpol wanted notice, was discovered in a Glasgow hospital ward during the pandemic.
He had been admitted for COVID-19 treatment and was subsequently arrested at the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital on December 13, 2021.
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