A Milan appeals court on Wednesday
gave two ISIS-linked jihadists who planned to hit the NATO base
at Ghedi near Brescia six years each for international
terrorism.
The Ghedi base is the base for anti-ISIS Tornados.
Tunisian Lassaad Briki and Pakistani Muhammad Waqas were
arrested in July 2015 after being caught on wiretaps talking
about attacks in Italy.
They also took propaganda selfies and made threats on the
Web, the court found.
The two supporters of ISIS also made threats against
landmarks in Rome and Milan.
The pair had created a Twitter account called 'Islamic_State
in Roma' and planned terrorist actions, posting messages with
photos of famous Italian sites in the background.
"We are in your streets. We are everywhere. We are locating
targets, waiting for time X," read some of the messages, written
in Italian, Arabic and French.
Some were written on scraps of paper and held up before a
camera with Rome's Colosseum and Milan's Duomo as well as its
bustling train station in the background, implying these were
terrorist targets.
"People of Rome, the choice of whether to die is up to you,"
they said.
As part of the investigation, police acquired wiretaps of
conversations between the men, who communicated in Italian as
that was they only language they had in common.
They allegedly discussed how to make a home-made bomb as set
out in a jihadi manual titled How to Survive in the West,
prosecution documents showed Wednesday.
"This you can use to place something here...a bomb...like
this," Waqas, 27, told Briki, 35, in a May 16, 2015 wiretapped
phone conversation.
"Not now, some day we will," Briki replied.
The jihadi manual "shows you little things such as how to
make a home-made bomb," Waqas said in the wiretap.
Briki, meanwhile, posted threatening messages on Twitter,
prosecution documents showed.
"We're already in Rome," he wrote on his homar_moktar and
homar_moktar2 Twitter feeds.
"Our knives are sharpened and ready for slaughter," he
wrote.
Waqas said he wanted to kill "two or three Carabinieri" at
the Ghedi air base while Briki, who said he was going to get
weapons including a kalashnikov, agreed they should try to kill
Americans too.
The men were legal residents of Italy and had been living
for years in Manerbio, a town near Brescia.
Sources said the men were both employed and had worked in
Italy for years, one as a labourer and the other in cleaning
services.
The name Omar Moktar appeared in one of the messages,
referring to an Al Qaeda leader but also to a man of the same
name known as the "Lion of the Desert," a Libyan national hero
who in the 1920s fought against Italian colonial forces.
Milan prosecutor Maurizio Romanelli said that in addition
to the Ghedi military base in Brescia as a potential target, the
pair also spoke of attacking the fruit shop where the Tunisian
man worked as a cleaner, and also issued "generic threats
against law enforcement".
He said that there was never, however, "a real danger with
the transition from words to action".
Briki also posted photos of the Tunisian beach in Sousse
where a terrorist attack took place in 2015.
Briki had returned to Tunisia to visit family for Ramadan
and went to the beach after the attacks had occurred.
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