Third terror suspect arrested in Bari

(supersedes previous)(ANSA) - Bari, March 24 - 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.