Fifteen 'Islamic extremists' arrested in Italy

Italian police said today they had arrested 15 Pakistani citizens accused of links to Osama bin Laden’s terror network.

The men, charged with association for the aim of international terrorism, arrived in Sicily on August 5 on a cargo ship from Casablanca, Morocco, officials said.

The ship had been headed to Libya, but stopped off the coast of Sicily because it was running out of supplies, officials said.

Authorities found that the men had fake passports and took them to a detention centre for illegal immigrants in the central Sicilian town of Caltanissetta, said police spokeswoman Piera Romagnosi.

Italian authorities received information from US Navy intelligence officials, as well as from the Italian secret services, she said.

Investigations yielded notes, phone numbers of people in France and Spain and plane tickets among other things, leading police to keep the 15 in custody. They were formally placed under arrest today, she said.

“At this stage, they were not planning any attack, either in Italy or elsewhere,” Romagnosi said. “We still don’t know what their activity, their targets or their roles were.”

The plane tickets - one for each of the suspects - were for a trip from Casablanca to Karachi in Pakistan.

In Washington, an American defence official said the cargo ship was on a US Navy watch list and had been suspected of smuggling Islamic fundamentalists in the past.

Italy has emerged as a logistical base for bin Laden’s terror operations in Europe since the September 11 attacks, law officers have said. In the past year, Italian police have arrested more than 30 people with alleged links to al Qaida.

Seven Tunisians were convicted earlier this year in a Milan court of helping al Qaida recruits obtain fake documents.

Among those convicted was Essid Sami Ben Khemais, the alleged head of bin Laden’s terrorist operations in Europe.