Italian security forces were rounding up 18 Islamic extremists Friday who prosecutors said were behind a failed 2010 plot to attack the Vatican as well as a bombing at a Pakistan market that killed more than 100 a year earlier.
Prosecutor Mauro Mura told reporters in Cagliari, Sardinia, on Friday that wiretaps indicated the suspected terrorists, including two former bodyguards for Usama bin Laden, planned a bomb attack at the Vatican and went as far as to send a suicide bomber to Rome. Mura said the attack plans never went further and that the suicide bomber left Italy, though it wasn't clear why.
Arrests warrants for the suspects, who were also linked to the deadly 2009 market bombing in Peshawar that alleged Islamic extremists, were being executed around the country. Anti-terror police on the island of Sardinia said they were executing arrest warrants for the suspects. Police said some were responsible for “numerous bloody acts of terrorism in Pakistan,” including a deadly October 2009 explosion in a Peshawar market that killed more than 100 people. Telephone wiretaps 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 terror 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 also being sought 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.
The Associated Press contributed to this report
Source: Top Stories - Google News - http://ift.tt/1OO7tJ9
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