Italian Mosque Was ‘Terror School’
Charles Johnson
Sat Jul 21, 2007 at 10:26 am PDT • Views: 376
Three non-Buddhists have been arrested in Italy, for belonging to a militant cell that was using a mosque in Perugia as a terror school.
ROME - Italian police arrested three Moroccans on Saturday — an imam and two aides — accusing them of belonging to a militant cell that allegedly used a mosque in central Italy as a terror training camp.
The cell held courses on hand-to-hand combat and used propaganda films and documents downloaded from the Internet to teach students how to prepare poisons and explosives, pilot a Boeing 747 and send encrypted messages, anti-terrorism police in Rome said in a statement.
The mosque on the outskirts of Perugia, the Umbrian capital, also offered weapons training, as well as instructions on how to ambush, how to reach combat zones safely and how to send encrypted messages, police said. Officers seized barrels of chemical substances, including acids, nitrates and ferrocyanide, found in the mosque’s cellar, police said, speculating that the chemicals could have been used for experiments in the terror training courses.
Police identified the imam as 41-year-old Korchi El Mostapha and his two aides as Mohamed El Jari, 47, and Driss Safika, 46. A fourth Moroccan was still being sought and was believed to be abroad.
The three men, arrested in Perugia, are accused of international terrorism, with the arrests coming after a two-year investigation. An additional 20 people who frequented Perugia’s Ponte Felcino mosque were being investigated for various charges, including violating Italy’s immigration laws, police said.
Outside daily prayers, the small mosque doubled as a training camp, the police statement said. The imam made fiery sermons inciting a small group of disciples, some of them children, to join the Holy War.
Frank says: