(supersedes previous)The arrest
earlier on Thursday of two British terror suspects is linked to
that of an Iraqi suspect who was also recently arrested in Bari,
sources said Thursday.
The news emerged after Gazzetta del Mezzogiorno paper
reported two Britons of Iraqi origin were arrested this week in
Bari. The pair are suspected of bringing into Italy false
passports for the Ansar al-Islam jihadist group, police said.
The third arrested suspect was named as Ridha Shwan Jalal
alias Kaka Sherzad, 38. He was found in possession of a fake
Czech Republic passport.
Bari prosecutors have been on his trail since June 2015,
and say that in August he requested an estimate from a travel
agency on a trip for 20 Iraqi citizens traveling in groups of
five from the city of Sulaymaniyah in Iraqi Kurdistan to Paris
via Istanbul.
Another suspect named as 45-year-old Iraqi national Muhamad
Majid (not Majid Muhamad as previously reported), was arrested
in connection with that estimate last year.
Majid allegedly provided Jalal with lodging and documents
in Bari. He was arrested in December on charges of abetting
illegal immigration as part of an international terrorism probe
into at least 10 suspects.
Majid is thought to have helped people linked to an
Italian cell of an Islamist terror group and "aiding the
entry into Europe of people linked to Islamist fundamentalist
combatant circles," police sources said at the time of his
arrest.
Investigators say he organized the illegal entry into Italy
of numerous foreigners using fake documents, including 11 people
from Egypt, Iran, Morocco, Pakistan, and Turkey whom he helped
find accommodation in Bari between March and September last
year, investigators said.
Majid had been released from an Italian prison in January
2015 after serving 10 years for international terrorism, and
moved to Bari after winning an appeal against an expulsion
order.
Wiretaps revealed he subsequently had telephone contact
with numerous people believed to be linked to an Islamist
terrorist group, and used what police believe to be code for
explosives when he spoke of two kilos of "truffles" his wife
sent him from Iraq.
During a February 2015 raid on a Bari apartment, police
confiscated from Majid postcards he sent from prison in which he
exalted the jihad, or Islamist holy war.
The suspect, who has been transferred to a maximum security
prison near the town of Rossano in Calabria, will be tried on
the illegal immigration charges beginning in April and is still
under investigation on separate international terrorism charges.
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