Italian police arrest leftwing terror suspects

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jun/13/italian-police-arrest-terror-suspects

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Police in Italy, Switzerland and Germany have arrested 10 people suspected of involvement in leftwing terrorist activity in Italy and elsewhere over the past three years.

Police sources said the suspects, detained in pre-dawn raids, all had links to one of two shadowy organisations: the Informal Anarchist Federation (FAI) and the International Revolutionary Front (FRI). Warrants issued by a judge in Perugia, in central Italy, accused them of a variety of offences including subversion, terrorist conspiracy and international terrorism.

Eight arrests were made in Italy, one in Switzerland, and one in Germany.

A senior officer in the semi-militarised Carabinieri police, General Giampaolo Ganzer, said the FAI and FRI were in a position to mount attacks with "both bombs and firearms". The general, who commands the Carabinieri's special forces, said the two groups were in contact with the Greek anarchist movement.

Those arrested appeared not to have been directly connected with the most serious recent terrorist attack in Italy – the shooting and wounding last month of a senior executive in the nuclear industry, Roberto Adinolfi of Finmeccanica. But in an interview with the Italian Sky TV network, General Ganzer said: "The origin is the same."

The warrants cited other terrorist operations, many of them abortive. These included a failed pipebomb attack on the business-oriented Bocconi university in Milan in 2009; recent blasts outside tax collection offices in different parts of Italy; a parcel bomb intercepted in Frankfurt in 2011 and sent to the then CEO of Deutsche Bank, Josef Ackermann; and, also in 2011, a parcel bomb addressed to the Greek embassy in Paris, which was later defused.

More than 40 searches were carried out in Italy alone. Among those taken into custody were two men arrested in 2009 on suspicion of sabotaging an Italian railway line.