Italian police have arrested three Palestinians based in central Italy who they said were planning attacks in an unspecified country, a police statement said on Monday.
The three men living in l’Aquila, about 120 km (75 miles) northeast of Rome, had set up a terrorist cell linked to the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, it said.
The Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades are a coalition of armed groups linked to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah movement. The organization is responsible for numerous attacks in the West Bank, targeting both Israelis and Palestinians.
The Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades have been designated as a terrorist group by the United States, Canada, Israel, Japan, New Zealand and the European Union.
Police said the three Palestinians have been charged with criminal conspiracy for terrorism purposes or subversion of the democratic order, which carries jail terms of up to 15 years.
“The suspects engaged in proselytism and propaganda … and planned attacks, including suicide attacks, against civilian and military targets on foreign territory,” police said.
The names of the three men have not been released, but one of them is wanted by Israel, which has been at war with the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas in the Gaza Strip since last year. An Italian court is examining an extradition request for him, the statement added.
“Satisfied with the capture of three dangerous terrorists in L’Aquila, an operation that confirms the continuous commitment and great investigative capacity of our law enforcement agencies,” Interior Minister Matteo Piantedosi said in a separate statement.
“My thanks go to the police forces and the judiciary for this important result which testifies to the constant monitoring and prevention action carried out on the front of extremism and radicalization,” the minister concluded.
In December, Italian police arrested two people of Pakistani origins in Northern Italy for spreading online terrorist propaganda linked to the Jihadist groups Palestine Islamic Jihad, Islamic State, and al-Qaeda.
A few months earlier, in October, two members of the Islamic State terror group were arrested in Milan. The two were of Egyptian origin.
The Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades have been active for over 20 years, playing a prominent role in the July 2004 riots in the Gaza Strip and carrying out joint attacks in the Gaza Strip with other militant Islamist groups such as Hamas and with Hezbollah in the West Bank.
In 2016, 15 masked gunmen from al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade raided the European Union’s offices in Gaza over the publication of cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad that offended Muslims. But the men reportedly left after half an hour, with no shots fired and no casualties.
Reuters contributed to this report.
