The jihadists responsible for some of the worst attacks in Europe have passed through Italy. Fausto Biloslavo’s analysis for Il Giornale published in Defense Analysis
In August, our secret services raised the alarm on the landing in Lampedusa and Sicily of Islamic terrorists from Tunisia mixed with migrants. “The information on the arrival of single dangerous elements or elements belonging to jihadist cells was considered circumstantial and reliable” explains to the newspaper those who read the information. Something also leaked in the newspaper Avvenire: “informal” communications from the Tunisian authorities who had lost track of former Islamic State fighters, veterans of the defeats in Iraq and Syria, probably already landed in Italy. On 20 September, Brahim Aoussaoui, the Tunisian cutthroat from Nice, arrived in Lampedusa.
In January, the carabinieri dismantled a network of human traffickers who brought common criminals and terrorists to Italy from Tunisia on fast boats for 2500 euros.
In October last year, a 25-year-old Tunisian who arrived in Lampedusa in July and hosted in a reception center was deported because he was identified as a jihadist who had fought in Syria.
Sillah Ousman and Alagie Touray, born in Gambia, were arrested in Naples between April and June 2018. The two, trained in Libya by Isis, had to carry out attacks in Europe. In December 2016 they arrived in Messina aboard a boat posing as migrants.
Another Tunisian, Noussair Louati, arrested in Ravenna in 2015 because he wanted to enlist in the Islamic State, had landed with us in 2011. After being sentenced to three and a half years in prison he would have repented and left in 2018 and then be repatriated.
Adam Harun, a Nigerian born in Saudi Arabia, had also landed in Lampedusa after fighting with al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Africa. He confessed to the killing of several American soldiers and was extradited to the United States and sentenced to life in prison.
The suicide bombers of the worst attacks in Europe have also passed from Italy. Tunisian Mohamed Lahaouiej Bouhlel slaughtered 84 people with a truck on the Nice seafront in 2016 before being mowed down by bullets.
The previous year he had been filmed and identified by the police in Ventimiglia while he was taking part in a pro-migrants demonstration with the Nice-based association “Heart of Hope”. Abdeslam Salah, the only survivor of the Parisian Bataclan massacre, had passed through Bari where he had taken the ferry to Piraeus and back. In Athens he had met Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the cell leader of the Paris massacre to carry out the plan. Khalid el-Bakraoui, one of the Moroccans of the suicide attacks in Brussels, which resulted in 35 deaths, had flown from Belgium to Treviso.
Then he stayed in Venice to board a flight to Athens awaiting orders. Nouruddine Chouchane, who became emir of the Tunisian rib of ISIS in Libya and considered the mastermind of the Bardo museum massacre, lived in the Novara area for five years, which caused 22 deaths including 4 Italians. The Italian Moroccan, Youssef Zaghba, left Bologna to stab to death in 2017, together with two other jihadists, 8 people in London.
