ITALY MUSLIM CLERIC HATE!
Italian court
upholds 12-year sentence for Kurdish Islamist cleric
July 11-2020
ERBIL
(Kurdistan 24) – An Italian appeals court on Friday upheld all the convictions
in the trial of suspected members of a so-called Jihadi cell, including its
leader, Mullah Krekar, the Italian news
agency Associated Press National Agency (ANSA) reported on Friday.
ANSA reported
that the court upheld the Kurdish Islamist cleric's 12-year prison
term and convicted him of being the "spiritual leader" of the Rawti Shax ("toward the
mountain" in Kurdish) terror cell, which was dismantled by Italian police
in the autumn of 2015. Sentences for five other cell members were also
reportedly upheld.
Dr. Francesco
Marone, a Research Fellow for the Center on
Radicalization and International Terrorism at the Italian Institute for
International Political Studies (ISPI), described the group's operations in an
interview with Kurdistan 24 on Saturday.
"Italian
investigators have argued that 'Mullah Krekar' was
the leader of extremist network Rawti Shax, worthy of note because, among other things, it was a
rather large transnational network and spread across different countries,"
Dr. Marone said.
The expert
stated further that the group was "involved in the recruitment of radicals
and foreign fighters who sought to travel to Syria and Iraq in order to
fight."
"According
to an original report on Italy's foreign fighters I
co-authored based on exclusive government information, at least one foreign
fighter (a Kosovar man, named Eldin Hodza) had close ties to the Rawti
Shax. Hodza (born 1988)
left for Syria from eastern Italy in January 2014 with the financial help of
the Rawti Shax," Marone added.
Italian media
reports suggest Italian investigators believe that the group had links to the
so-called Islamic State.
According to
a profile of the group by the Terrorism
Research Analysis Consortium (TRAC), Rawti Shax claimed it aimed "to overthrow the Iraqi Kurdish
regional government and replace it with a caliphate ruled by Shariah law."
In November
2015, the Italian police dismantled a cell of 17 individuals (16 Kurds and 1
Kosovar) linked to the group spread between Norway, the UK, Finland, and Italy,
with seven members arrested in the latter.
"The
Internet helped their transnational contacts. They also set up online and
offline jihadist educational activities in Italy. According to Italian
investigators, they were reportedly ready to plot attacks, but not in
Italy," Dr. Marone said.
Krekar is the former leader of the extremist
Islamist Ansar al-Islam group that the US targeted during its liberation of Iraq in 2003. Both the
United Nations and the US consider him a terrorist.
Krekar, 63, has lived in Norway since 1991. The
Scandinavian nation has been unable to legally deport him to Iraq due to fears
he might face the death penalty.
He was jailed
several times for death threats in 2012 and for praising the Charlie Hebdo
shooting in Paris, France, in 2015.
However, in
March 2020, Mullah Krekar was extradited from Norway
to Italy to face trial. A Bolzano court sentenced Mullah Krekar and his followers to prison in July 2019.
Now he is
reportedly held in the high-security prison of Sassari, Sardinia.
"This
week the Court of Appeals in Bolzano upheld all the sentences. Generally
speaking, this case confirms the tough position of Italian authorities on
jihadism," Dr. Marone concluded.
Italy to
Deport Imam Who Beat Children at Religious School
23 Nov 2019
Breitbart
A 23-year-old
Bangladeshi imam faces deportation from Italy after investigators confirmed he
had physically assaulted young children at a religious school.
The migrant,
who lived in Italy on a work visa, is said to have created what investigators
described as a “climate of terror” at a Quranic school in Padua and engaged in
humiliating young pupils and physically assaulting them, sometimes with a
stick, Il Giornale reports.
The beatings
of the children, who were aged between five and ten years old, took place at
the Bangladesh Cultural Centre in the Arcella
district of Padua. Investigators noted that the 23-year-old would engage in
physical violence against the children for as little as a wrong answer or
catching them being distracted.
Agents of the
General Investigations and Special Operations Division (DIGOS), which
investigated the case, also found photographs and posts of Nazi leader Adolf
Hitler and proposed that he may have also been teaching the young children
antisemitic ideas.
Italy has
deported several radical imams in recent years, including a Tunisian earlier
this year who came into the country illegally and declared to police that he
would not only kill them but he
would eat their corpses as well.
Last year,
another Tunisian imam was expelled from the
country after it was found that he celebrated the Berlin Christmas market
terror attack from his prison cell. The imam was already in prison for robbery
and drug dealing.
The former
Italian coalition government of populist Matteo Salvini’s
League and the Five Star Movement (M5S) led all of Europe last year for deportations of
radical Islamists. Both illegal immigration and prison radicalisation
have led to a growth in the number of jihadists in the country.
Professor
Paolo Branca, Islamologist
at the Catholic University of Milan, has even claimed that some jihadists get
arrested on purpose in order to be able to preach and radicalise
others behind bars.
Islamic cell
funding radical imams uncovered in Italy
“God blessed
his soul,” Jameleddine B. Brahim
Kharroubi said speaking of former Al Qaeda leader
Osama Bin Laden.
SEPTEMBER 8,
2019
Jerusalem Post
Ten people
were arrested in the Italian regions of Piemonte and Abruzzo on charges of
terrorism, money laundering and covert financing, Italian daily La
Stampa reported on Sunday.
Through tax
evasion, Jameleddine B. Brahim
Kharroubi, a small business owner of Tunisian origin,
accumulated about two million euros to fund radical imams in Italy and abroad.
The report
highlighted that Brahim Kharroubi
and the uncovered Islamic cell had ties with Al Nusra, the Al Qaeda branch active in Syria.
“God blessed
his soul,” Brahim Kharroubi
said speaking of former Al Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden in a 2016 conversation
tapped by Italian security forces. In other discussions, the man praised Al
Nusra and Islamic fighters “ready to martyrdom,” and expressed his support for
the 2015 terror attacks in Paris. He also worked to recruit foreign fighters to
send to Syria.
According
to La Stampa, the 57-year-old had been monitored by several intelligence
agencies for his financial ties with radical Islamic organizations for several
years. He was included in the Europol database and
Terrorist Finance Tracking Program as a member of a network devoted to
transfer covert funds to Morocco since 2005. In 2005, Brahim
Kharroubi served as the treasurer of an Islamic
association in Turin promoting interfaith dialogue.
Along with Brahim Kharroubi, Italian police
forces arrested among others Atem Argoubi,
an imam serving in a mosque in the Abruzzo region.
Imam Deported
from Italy After Celebrating Terror Attacks in Prison
22 Sep 2018
Breibart
A Tunisian imam has been expelled from Italy after it was revealed that he had
celebrated the Berlin Christmas Market terror attack in December of 2016 from
his prison cell.
The 32-year-old imam, who had been convicted of robbery and drug dealing, was
serving his sentence at the Rebibbia prison in Rome
where he praised Islamic State and terrorist acts, Il Giornale
reports.
One of the attacks the imam celebrated was the 2016 Berlin Christmas Market
attack in which fellow Tunisian Anis Amri used a truck to run over multiple
innocent people, killing a dozen and injuring 56 others. After the attack, it was
revealed that Amri was said to have been radicalised
in an Italian prison.
The imam was also said to have been spreading radical Islamic radical ideology
among the prisoners and was said to be ready to imitate the deeds of Amri and
commit a terror attack.
The expulsion order came after the 32-year-old had served his prison sentence
and was set for release on August 22nd. Instead of being released, he was
transferred to a repatriation centre along with three
Egyptian nationals who were considered threats to Italian national security.
All four men were put on a direct flight from Rome to Cairo on Wednesday
afternoon.
The case is just the latest example of the presence of radical Islam in
European prisons, with the problem being a major issue in France.
Last year, two radical Islamic inmates at Fresnes prison were caught plotting a
terror attack that they were to carry out upon their release and investigators
also manage to find smuggled phones that allowed the pair to communicate with
Islamic State.
Prisons across Europe have been referred to as breeding grounds for Islamic
radicalism in a 2016 study released by the International Centre for the Study
of Radicalisation and Political Violence (ICSR).
In Austria, senior imam Ramazan Demir also spoke out against radicalisation in prisons last November saying: “Prisoners
who behave inconspicuously at first mutate into ticking time bombs. Suddenly
driven by hatred, they speak of wanting to commit murders.”
His comments came after radical Islamic literature was discovered at Korneuburg prison a month beforehand.
Italy expels Muslim cleric who refused to accept gender parity
08/09/2016
About Croatia
A Moroccan man who served as a "stand-in imam" in a mosque in
northern Italy was forcibly repatriated home because he refused to accept
Italian constitutional rights such as gender parity, Interior Minister Angelino
Alfano said Thursday.
Following the Charlie Hebdo Islamist attacks in Paris in January 2015, Italy
adopted legislation making it easier for police to arrest or expel suspected
terrorists. Since then, 115 have been sent home, including 12 imams, Alfano
said in a statement.
The latest case concerns a 33-year-old who acted as secretary of the Muslim
Community of Treviso, an industrial town in north-east Italy about 40 kilometres north of Venice. He was put on a plane to
Casablanca late on Wednesday, the minister said.
The decision was taken because the man refused to swear on the constitution
before taking up Italian citizenship, arguing that his ultra-conservative
Salafist Islam beliefs were "fully incompatible" with Italy's
fundamental laws.
He denounced Italian laws as "'a collection of sins upon sins' such as,
for example, parity between men and women," Alfano said.
The minister has for weeks been publicizing an anti-radicalization campaign for
Muslim preachers, which should lead to new rules requiring them to study
Italian rules and customs and deliver their sermons in Italian.
"We are working to create a new model of imam, which we could call 'Italian
imam,'" Alfano told the Libero newspaper in July, expressing concern that
current Muslim clerics in Italy are all foreign-trained "and therefore
have different values from us and sometimes radical inclinations."