Terrorist Plot Targets Church and Metro in Italy’
Daily Times ^ | 4/6/06 | AFP

Posted on 04/06/2006 6:44:33 PM PDT by voletti

CAGLIARI: Eight Moroccans and a Tunisian arrested in Morocco last month plotted terrorist attacks against a church in Bologna and the Milan underground rail system, Italian Interior Minister Giuseppe Pisanu said Thursday. “Now I can say it: a terrorist plot could have hit our country and we were able to forestall it,” said the minister, adding that the targets in Italy were the San Petronio church in Bologna and the Milan underground. Pisanu made his comments in Cagliari in Sardinia three days ahead of general elections in Italy. On Tuesday, Moroccan police said they had arrested nine people in March who were “planning terrorist acts in Paris and Bologna.” “A metro line in Paris, a shopping center and the headquarters of the French domestic intelligence agency (DST) in Paris were also targeted by the group,” the police said. The nine men, arrested on March 24 by police in Casablanca, aimed to establish ties with the radical Algerian Islamist movement, the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC), according to police. They were charged in a court in Sale, near Rabat, with forming “a criminal gang with a view to committing terrorist acts,” and with collecting and managing funds for terrorist purposes, a police source said. AFP