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| Europe |
| Report Of Suicide Bombers School 'baseless', Magistrate Says |
| 2005-09-29 |
| Rome, 29 Sept. (AKI) - A leading anti-terrorism prosecutor says reports of a 'school for suicide bombers' in Northern Italy, leaked to the press by Italian military secret services (SISMI) in the aftermath of July's London's bombings, were unreliable and without foundation. The director of SIMSI - general Niccolò Pollari - had at the time personally reported the threat to the parliamentary committee that oversees the intelligence services. However, prosecutor Armando Spataro on Wednesday told the committee that police investigations had revealed the SISMI source as "a man with alcohol, drug and psychological problems". Teddy Kennedy? In July, Italian newspaper La Stampa splashed on its front page the findings of the Italian intelligence services (SISMI) about an alleged terrorist training centre in the northern Italian region of Lombardy. The "school for suicide bombers" had reportedly been under observation for several weeks, well before the 7 July London bombings, and SISMI had compiled a detailed dossier, with names and operational information. However, there had been no related arrests. The report spoke of 'trainers' who had arrived from abroad and were planning attacks in Italy. Armando Spataro, who has coordinated various inquiries into Islamic terror cells in Italy, told the parliamentary committee that the alarm was 'completely unfounded'. After the coordinated bombings of London's transport system, Italy - one of the countries with the largest number of troops in Iraq - fears it might become al-Qaeda's next target, as underlined on several occasions by the country's interior minister Giuseppe Pisanu. This week Pisanu said Italy will be under the threat of terrorism for the next fifteen years. That's a reasonable estimate Italy had remained on high anti-terror alert since the 11 September 2001 attacks on the United States and the bomb attack on the Italian military barracks in Nasiriya, Iraq, in November 2003, in which 17 Italian soldiers and two civilians died. |
| Posted by:Steve |
| #1 Parents are worried about the Pass or Boom grading system. |
| Posted by: Shipman 2005-09-29 16:13 |