Italy Terror Cell Prepared for Vatican Attack, Prosecutors Claim
Italian police make series of raids against 18 people suspected of links to al-Qaeda
Vatican City and Rome. Photograph: Sylvain Sonnet/Getty Images
Agencies in Milan and Rome, Friday 24 April 2015
Italian prosecutors said that terror suspects, including two purported bodyguards of Osama bin Laden, targeted in raids on Friday had made preparations for a 2010 attack against the Vatican.
Prosecutor Mauro Mura told a press conference in Cagliari, Sardinia, on Friday that wiretaps indicated the suspected terrorists were planning a bomb attack at the Vatican and that a suicide bomber had arrived in Rome.
Mura said the attack plans never went further and that the suicide bomber left Italy, though it wasn’t clear why. He said the wiretaps gave “signals of some preparation for a possible attack.”
Police conducted raids across Italy on Friday, targeting 18 people suspected of links with al-Qaida. Some were arrested, including the group’s suspected spiritual leader, but others were believed to have left the country.
“We don’t have proof, we have strong suspicion,” said Mario Carta, head of the police unit leading the investigation said when asked for more details on a possible attack against the seat of the Catholic Church.
The suspects arrested on Friday had also sought to topple the Pakistani government, police said.
Counter-terrorism police in Sardinia said some of the 18 suspects were responsible for “numerous bloody acts of terrorism in Pakistan”, including the October 2009 explosion in a market in Peshawar in which more than 100 people died.
Telephone wiretaps also indicated that two of the suspects were part of a network of people who protected Bin Laden in Pakistan, a police statement said.
Police said the aim of the network was to create an insurrection against the Pakistani government.
Pasquale Errico, the police chief in the city of Sassari, said the warrants were being executed throughout Italy. The suspects were being sought also for financing terrorist movements in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Sardinian daily L’Unione Sarda reported that one of the suspects ran a construction business in Olbia.
“There is the hypothesis that he was recruiting immigrants who arrived here by airplane with false documents and involved them in illegal activities,” the paper’s editor, Anthony Muroni, told Sky TG24.