al-Qaida linked terror school busted
ROME: Operating in a nondescript mosque in Perugia, the central hill town known for its Renaissance architecture and idyllic countryside, a small extremist cell allegedly ran what Italian police say was a “terror school” that trained in hand-to-hand combat, bomb making and airplane piloting.
Anti-terrorism police said they arrested three Moroccans — an imam and two of his aides — on Saturday and raided the Ponte Felcino mosque on the outskirts of the Umbrian capital, finding barrels of chemicals hidden in the cellar, and documents including instructions on how to pilot a Boeing 747.
“The investigation has shown that, in the Ponte Felcino mosque, there was a continued training for terrorist activity,” 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.”
The modest mosque, on the ground floor of a red-painted residential building, hid chemical substances, including acids, nitrates and ferrocyanide, which may have been used to experiment during the courses, said Claudio Galzerano, head of the international terrorism division with the anti-terror police.
Activities at the mosque used films and documents downloaded from the Internet, and included weapons training, instructions on how to prepare poisons and explosives, as well as how to lay an ambush, reach combat zones safely and send encrypted messages, police said in a statement.