Italian security forces were rounding up 18 Islamic extremists Friday who prosecutors said were behind a failed 2010 plot to attack the Vatican as well as a bombing at a Pakistan market that killed more than 100 a year earlier.
Prosecutor Mauro Mura told reporters in Cagliari, Sardinia, on Friday that wiretaps indicated the suspected terrorists, including two former bodyguards for Usama bin Laden, planned a bomb attack at the Vatican and went as far as to send a suicide bomber to Rome. Mura said the attack plans never went further and that the suicide bomber left Italy, though it wasn’t clear why.
At the time of the suspected plot to bomb the Vatican, Pope Benedict XVI was still reeling from the effects in the Muslim world of a 2006 speech in Regensburg, Germany, in which he quoted a Byzantine emperor who characterized some of the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad as “evil and inhuman,” particularly “his command to spread by the sword the faith.”
While relations with the Muslim world were eventually repaired, tensions flared again in 2011 when Cairo’s al-Azhar institute, the pre-eminent theological school of Sunni Islam, suspended interfaith talks with the Vatican after Benedict called for greater protections for Egypt’s minority Christians.
More recently, Italian officials have made clear they take seriously the threat of the Islamic State group to conquer Rome and the seat of Christianity. Security has been beefed up at the Vatican and the head of the Swiss Guards has said they are ready but that they have no information about an imminent threat. Still, Pope Francis himself has said he realizes he may be a target but that he fears mostly for the innocent crowds who come to see him every time he’s in public.
The investigation was launched in 2005, but Mura said it was slowed when news of the investigation leaked to the media, alerting the suspects that they were being watched.
Arrests warrants for the suspects, who were also linked to the deadly 2009 market bombing in Peshawar that alleged Islamic extremists, were being executed around the country.
Anti-terror police on the island of Sardinia said they were executing arrest warrants for the suspects. Police said some were responsible for “numerous bloody acts of terrorism in Pakistan,” including a deadly October 2009 explosion in a Peshawar market that killed more than 100 people. Telephone wiretaps indicated that two of the suspects were part of a network of people who protected Bin Laden in Pakistan, a police statement said.
Police said the aim of the terror network was to create an insurrection against the Pakistani government.
Pasquale Errico, the police chief in the city of Sassari, said the warrants were being executed throughout Italy. The suspects were also being sought for financing terrorist movements in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Sardinian daily L’Unione Sarda reported that one of the suspects ran a construction business in Olbia.
“There is the hypothesis that he was recruiting immigrants who arrived here by airplane with false documents and involved them in illegal activities,” the paper’s editor Anthony Muroni told Sky TG24.
