16 arrested in Europe-wide anti-terror crackdown

Europe, Middle East, News November 12, 2015 , by IRIA No Comments

Suspects are alleged to have planned terrorist attacks, recruited fighters and plotted to break founder out of jail in Norway

At least sixteen ISIS-linked terrorist suspects have been arrested in a coordinated sweep by police across Europe, Italian police said Thursday.

The suspected members of an Islamist militant group was planning attacks in Norway and the Middle East, Italian authorities said on Thursday.

Officials said the militants allegedly planned to strike Norwegian and British diplomats in the Middle East and politicians in Norway in a bid to free their leader while he was imprisoned.

“This is the most important international police operation in Europe in 20 years,” Italian anti-terrorism chief Giuseppe Governale told a news conference in Rome.

Police in Oslo said there had never been a “concrete or acute threat” against any Norwegian citizens or interests.

The suspects included 16 Kurds and one person from Kosovo. Seven of them were arrested in Italy, four in Britain, three in Norway, and one in Finland, according to Italian officials.

“This was an incredibly difficult and complicated investigation that has been going on for five years,” said prosecutor Franco Roberti, the head of Italy’s anti-mafia and anti-terrorism unit.

“The group was organizing, via (the Internet), hostile activities against diplomats from Norway and the United Kingdom, to be carried out in the Middle East” in retaliation for a recent Krekar imprisonment, said Gen. Giuseppe Governale, commander of a special operations unit of Italy’s military police.

The militant group is accused of using an online network to radicalize fighters to send to the Middle East, with the eventual aim of setting up a caliphate in Iraq’s Kurdistan region.