November 21, 2005

Terror Cells Busted in Italy, Morocco

For some unexplained reason, two significant victories in the war on terror over this past week have received scant media attention. First, in Italy, three Algerians were detained on November 15 and charged with planning a major seaborne attack that could have killed as many as 10,000 people. Here's more, from AKI:

The three Algerians detained on Tuesday in the Italian cities of Brescia and Naples were planning a massive terror attack - "on a ship as big as the Titanic, packed with explosives" - that aimed to kill "at least 10,000 people", as well as an attack on "Italian citizens and interests" in Tunisia, according to phone conversations between the three men, which Italian anti-terror police say they intercepted after al-Qaeda's deadly 7 July attacks on London and on the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Sharm El-Sheikh.

The arrests were apparently a victory for Italian intelligence:

The men's arrest in Brescia and Naples came as they were allegedly about to flee Italy and followed a complex three-year surveillance operation of a GSPC cell by the Italian intelligence service SISMI. The three were flush with cash, and moved around constantly between the northern cities of Brescia and Vicenza, the Italian capital, Rome, and the southern city of Naples, police allege. They were also in contact with other terror cells in the northern cities of Venice, Cesena and Milan, as well as the central Italian city of Florence, according to the investigators. They say they also have evidence of the three men being in contact with extremist groups in Norway, France and Britain.

Rumors have swirled for months concerning the jihadists' desire to hit Italy--and hit it hard--particularly the Rome subway system or the Vatican. Many of these Italy-based terrorists hail from North Africa. Which brings us to Morocco, where authorities have arrested 17 men for their link to al-Qaeda; at least come of the men had contacts with al-Qaeda in Iraq. Most interestingly, two of the men had spent time as prisoners at the U.S. base at Guantanamo Bay. They're merely the latest in a growing list of former Guantanamo Bay prisoners to return to the battlefield to fight against U.S. forces. Further proof that the terrorists detained at Gitmo are very bad men who deserve to be there, contrary to the arguments of the anti-war left.

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