ISIS-linked jihadists get 6 yrs (3)

(ANSA) - Milan, May 24 - 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.