An apparent attempt to blow up a McDonald’s drive-in restaurant in northern Italy was foiled on Sunday but the suspected terrorist died when his car exploded with him strapped inside.
| Cue the Spike Jones version of "My Old Flame"... |
Witnesses said a man, later identified as Moustafa Chaouki, a native of Casablanca, drove his Fiat Tempra into the queue of cars waiting at the restaurant in Brescia, 100km east of Milan, at 10 pm. His car contained four cylinders of kitchen gas, each with a capacity of more than 70 litres. Police believe he opened the taps of the cylinders, filling the car with gas. Witnesses said he then suddenly opened the driver’s door, and the car detonated into a fireball.
| Sounds like a pretty inept member of the al-Kaboomi clan... |
A woman in the car directly behind the Fiat, told the daily, Corriere della Sera: "I had just said to my boyfriend, ’Don’t you smell something strange?’ Then there was the blast. That man didn’t even try to get out of the car. He stayed there, immobile in his seat, with one leg out of the door." About 20 customers were inside the restaurant, and a firefighter told Corriere: "We arrived within three minutes, and it was fortunate that we did because we succeeded in containing the explosion, chilling some of the gas cylinders inside the car." Otherwise, the unnamed officer added, the cylinders could have exploded, firing lethal metal fragments through the restaurant windows and possibly igniting other cylinders of carbon dioxide belonging to the restaurant which were close to the burning car.
| Well, maybe heating them up so they'd explode. Takes a lot of matches to get CO2 to ignite. |
Moustafa Chaouki was born in Casablanca, Morocco, in 1968 and was a resident of Brescia. Yesterday the assistant prosecutor of the city, Roberta di Martino, who is also the city’s anti-terrorism boss, would only say of the incident: "It was not an accidental occurrence."
| "But it was larger than my grandmother's cat." |
Last year, a Palestinian with a Kuwaiti passport, Al Khatib Muhammad, died in his car after it exploded close to a synagogue in the town of Modena, 160 kms south-east of Brescia. The crime is still unsolved.
| "Legume! I suspect there may be a terrorism angle to this... But I... just... can't... put... my... finger on it." |
And prosecutors in Brescia are also investigating an imam linked to the Iraq-based Islamist terror group Ansar-al-Islam, who was arrested one year ago. Mourad Trabelsi, the former imam of a mosque in the town of Cremona, 50km south-west of Brescia, was arrested in April last year, after being under surveillance by the Brescia authorities for three years. Investigators believe he helped raise funds for terrorist activities, recruited would-be terrorists and acted as the intermediary between a cell of Italy-based terrorists and international terrorist groups. |