Italian police have arrested an Egyptian, a Somali and two Iraqi Kurds on suspicion of having links with Islamic terrorist groups, anti-terrorism police said Tuesday. The arrests were ordered by Milan prosecutor Stefano Dambruoso, who has been leading investigations into suspected Islamic cells in Italy. Bruno Megale of Milan's anti-terrorism police confirmed the arrests but refused to say where or when they were made, saying the investigation was in progress. The Italian news agency ANSA and other reports said that two of the men were picked up in Milan and other two in Parma, another northern Italian city. They were planning to leave the country, the reports said. Italian dailies Corriere della Sera and La Repubblica said the arrests were apparently carried out Monday evening and the men were suspected of belonging to an extremist Islamic group based in northern Iraq called Ansar al-Islam. Corriere reported that before the arrests, the suspects' telephone conversations had been tapped for months.
Let's hope they have enough to hold them.
| Ansar was actually a pretty smart operation: set up in the hinterlands of the most unstable and inaccessible (to westerners) area they could find, with an outward glow of rustic Talibanism, the facade hid Zarqawi's Tawhid operation — which was the real, professional core of Bad Guys — that spread from Kurdistan through Syria, Lebanon, Chechnya, and into Europe and Britain. I wonder where Zarqawi is now? |
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