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| Europe | |||
| Parallel Italian police operation discovered | |||
| 2005-07-01 | |||
| Italian authorities have uncovered a "parallel" police structure which allegedly masqueraded as a specialised anti-terrorist unit in a scam to obtain funding from donors including NATO and the CIA. Anti-terrorist police, acting on orders of investigators in the northwestern port of Genoa, on Friday carried out dawn raids on some 25 homes and offices in nine Italian regions. Some 24 people - including several regular police and Carabinieri paramilitary officers - are been investigated in connection with the scam, which operated under the phoney name of 'Department of Anti-terrorism Strategic Studies (DSSA). The two alleged ring-leaders of the group, Gaetano Saya and Roberto Sindoca, have been placed under house arrest at their respective homes in Florence and in the northern town of Pavia. Saya has a history of involvement in extreme-rightwing politics. The men are being charged with criminal association aimed at usurping state functions. Investigators say the group set up the DSSA after the 2004 Madrid train bombings, in which 191 people died, to fool unsuspecting donors into believing it was an anti-terrorist branch of Italy's security services. The organisation had its own Internet website, now disabled, through which it requested money in exchange for security dossiers and alerts on possible terrrorist attacks.
Quattrocchi was shot dead by his Iraqi abductors, a group calling itself the Green Brigade, while his colleagues were eventually released. | |||
| Posted by:Dan Darling |