Italy accuses imam of training terrorists

ROME – Italian police swooped into a mosque in central Italy’s bucolic Umbria region Saturday and arrested an imam and two aides suspected of operating a terrorism training school and of preparing fighters for attacks abroad.

All three detainees, plus a fourth suspect outside the country, are Moroccan nationals.

The arrests come after a two-year investigation and are the latest evidence of the expanding presence of al-Qaida-style groups in Morocco and the rest of the Maghreb region of northern Africa, with their branches in Italy, Spain and other parts of Europe.

Italian authorities alleged that the mosque in the Umbrian capital, Perugia, was being used to teach followers to build bombs, wage hand-to-hand combat, use guns and poisons, and pilot a Boeing 747.

“An actual terrorism school has been discovered and dismantled,” Carlo de Stefano, head of Italy’s counter-terrorism police, told reporters. He said the operation at the mosque was one of numerous autonomous cells throughout Europe that function as part of a “widespread terrorism network.”

In their raid on the Ponte Felcino mosque, a ground-floor apartment in a nondescript building on the outskirts of Perugia, authorities confiscated barrels of various chemicals that potentially could be used in explosives. Instructions for most of the alleged terror training came via Internet downloads of manuals and propaganda videos, police said.

“They were preparing explosives,” Italian Interior Minister Giuliano Amato said Saturday night. “The thing we don’t know is whether they were going to use them in Italy or in Morocco.”

Italian authorities did not link the men arrested Saturday to a specific attack but said they had ties to the Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group, a Maghreb-based network implicated in recent deadly bombings in Madrid, Spain; Casablanca, Morocco; and Algiers, Algeria, and that last year announced its allegiance to al-Qaida.

Spanish counter-terrorism officials, who have conducted extensive investigations into the Maghreb networks, say parts of northern Africa have been converted into an Afghanistan-like no-man’s land for training camps.