The local Genoa daily, Il Secolo XIX, said at least eight of the arrest warrants had been executed in Italy against people belonging to “a network of Islamist extremists (…) who were plotting attacks”.
People gather as a person holding a cover of the French satirical weekly ‘Charlie Hebdo’ reading ‘All this, just for that’, Place du Capitole in Toulouse on October 18, 2020, in tribute to history professor Samuel Paty two days after he was beheaded by an assailant who was shot dead by police officers. Photo: AFP.
ROME — Italian counter-terrorism police and Europol on Tuesday arrested Pakistanis suspected of links to the man who attacked French magazine Charlie Hebdo in 2020.
The sting led to ‘arrests in Italy and abroad of Pakistani citizens with direct links’ to Zaheer Hassan Mahmood, a Pakistani man who attacked two people with a meat cleaver weeks after the magazine republished cartoons controversial stories of the Prophet Muhammad, Italian police said.
He did not specify how many were arrested.
Europol’s European Counter-Terrorism Center coordinated the operation with counter-terrorism police in France and Spain, according to police in Genoa, northwestern Italy, where a judge signed 14 warrants for judgment concerning offenses linked to “international terrorism”.
The local Genoa daily, Il Secolo XIX, said at least eight of the arrest warrants had been executed in Italy against people belonging to “a network of Islamist extremists (…) who were plotting attacks”.
The investigation began in Genoa because one of the suspects lives in the area, but months of “wiretapping, surveillance, tailing suspects and comparing lots of data with police from other countries” have taken place. revealed other members of the gang in other parts of Italy, France and Spain, he said.
The investigation is continuing into other people with alleged links to those targeted in Tuesday’s sting, he added.
Mahmood injured two people in the 2020 attack, which came five years after 12 staff members of the satirical weekly were shot dead for publishing the cartoons, considered blasphemous by many Muslims.
