This summer Italian police arrested an imam and two of his aides, all from Morocco, in a mosque in the central city of Perugia they were using as a “terrorism school.”
The “religious” leader taught courses on preparing poisons, bomb making, and hand-to-hand combat. Perhaps most chilling, according to the Italian anti-terrorist police, the imam had downloaded videos from the Internet on how to pilot a Boeing 747 – presumably enough to fly one into a skyscraper.
The Ponte Felcino mosque held dozens of barrels of chemicals used to make explosives. Its grounds were used for weapons training and practicing ambushes and attacks. “We have discovered and neutralized a real 'terror school' which was part of a widespread terrorism system made up of small cells that act on their own,” said police anti-terrorism head Carlo De Stefano.
“It's time to halt the terrorist production line by closing the mosque terrorism schools.”
Police said the cell was in contact with another organization, the Moroccan Islamic Combat Group, which is believed linked to al-Qaida and the 2004 Madrid bombings and 2003 attacks in Casablanca.
Islamofascism is being exported from the Middle East and cultivated in mosques linked throughout the world. One such linkage is a mosque in England that was involved in the mass murder of schoolchildren in Beslan.
