Terrorist Cell May Have Sought to Attack the Vatican, Italian Officials Say

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/25/world/europe/vatican-italy-plot.html

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ROME — The Italian authorities arrested nine people on Friday and said they were part of a Qaeda-linked terrorist cell based on the island of Sardinia that the police have been watching for years.

The group plotted attacks in Pakistan, and at one point planned to strike the Vatican, as part of a “big jihad in Italy,” one police official said. Another nine suspects were still being sought.

Wiretaps collected over the course of seven years of active investigation found “signals of some preparation for a possible attack” at the Vatican in March 2010, Mauro Mura, the chief prosecutor of Cagliari, Sardinia, told reporters on Friday. Those wiretaps revealed the presence in Rome of a Pakistani man “described as a kamikaze,” Mr. Mura said, meaning someone who “was destined for martyrdom.”

Mr. Mura said the planned attack was not necessarily aimed at the pope of the time, Benedict XVI, but rather at the throngs of tourists and pilgrims who fill St. Peter’s Square twice a week to hear the pope speak. “Kamikaze, crowded place, these are the clues,” he said.

The attack was never carried out, possibly because the suspects learned that the police were on their trail. Mr. Muro said on Friday that “our activity was indispensable to ensure that the irreparable did not happen.”

Investigators painted the Vatican plot as one element in a wide-ranging investigation that centered mostly on several prominent members of the Pakistani community in Italy. One suspect was described as a leader of the Muslim community in the Sardinian town of Olbia; another was said to be a well-known imam in Lombardy.

It was not immediately clear why the arrests were being made now.

The Italian authorities began their investigation in 2005, in the wake of suicide bombing attacks in London that raised concerns across Europe. It continued for seven years, focusing on Sardinia but also touching cities elsewhere in Italy. Some of the suspects in the case had direct contacts with Osama bin Laden before he was killed in 2011, the authorities said.

But the investigation wound down after 2012, when the suspects “desisted from further activity” and became “more prudent and less active,” because they discovered they were under surveillance, Mr. Mura said.

Prosecutors then spent more than two years quietly building what they hoped would be an airtight case. “It took time because it was an enormous investigation,” said Danilo Tronci, a prosecutor who worked on the case. Mr. Mura said the process was slowed in part by the difficulty of translating wiretap recordings.

The police said in a statement that the cell was “an organization dedicated to transnational criminal activities, inspired by Al Qaeda and other radical groups that have called for armed struggle against the West.” Investigators said they believed the group also hoped to foment a popular uprising in Pakistan that would force the government there to stop fighting the Taliban and turn against the United States; the suspects raised money in Italy for that purpose, they said.

Many of the suspects came from the same area in Pakistan, close to where Bin Laden was killed in 2011, investigators said. Two members of the organization were described as part of the “network of supporters that protected Osama bin Laden in Pakistan.”

Investigators said that some of the suspects were “responsible for numerous and bloody acts of terrorism and sabotage in Pakistan,” including an attack in 2009 at a market in Peshawar that killed more than 100 people.

The group was also involved in human trafficking, illegally smuggling Pakistani and Afghan citizens into Italy and money back to Pakistan, investigators said. And officials said there was evidence that the group had ordered the murder of a couple who were accused of violating religious law, and were plotting the murder of a Pakistani official.

None of the nine suspects arrested on Friday were charged with involvement in the Vatican plot because there was too little direct evidence, officials said. Mr. Tronci said the prosecutors would continue to build their case, pursuing contacts that the suspects had with people elsewhere in Europe, including Britain and Norway.

The Vatican played down the news of the 2010 plot on Friday. Pietro Parolin, the Vatican secretary of state, said that Pope Francis continued to meet freely with members of the public.