ROME, 22 July 2007 — Italian police yesterday broke up a militant cell by arresting three Moroccans — an imam and two of his aides — who they said used a mosque in the central city of Perugia as a “terror school.”
The group ran courses on hand-to-hand combat and used propaganda films and documents downloaded from the Internet to teach how to prepare poisons and explosives and how to pilot a Boeing 747, anti-terrorism police in Rome said in a statement.
Officers seized barrels of chemical substances, including acids, nitrates and ferrocyanide, that were found in the mosque’s cellar and may have been used to experiment during the courses, police officials said. The activity at the mosque on the outskirts of the Umbrian capital also included weapons training, as well as instructions on how to lay an ambush, reach combat zones safely and send encrypted messages.
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, police said.
The four are accused of conducting training with the aim of international terrorism, with the arrests coming after a two-year investigation.
A further 20 people who frequented Perugia’s Ponte Felcino Mosque were placed under investigation on various charges, including violating Italy’s immigration laws, police said. In hours outside daily prayers, the small mosque doubled as a training camp, the police statement said. The imam held courses, showed propaganda messages and made fiery sermons inciting a small group of disciples, some of them children, to join the holy war.
Anti-terror police head Carlo De Stefano said: “We have discovered and neutralized a real ‘terror school’ which was part of a widespread terrorism system made up of small cells that act on their own.”
Police did not say if members of the group had taken part in terror attacks or were planning any. However, they said in the statement that the cell had contacts with two Moroccans arrested two years ago in Belgium who were members of the Moroccan Islamic Combat Group.
