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...Initially arrested in November on immigration violations, French nationals Bassam Ayachi and Raphael Gendron were remanded in custody on Tuesday and charged with terrorism offenses after Italian authorities established their ties to an extremist network operating in France and Belgium. The Italian magistrates in charge of the investigation say evidence collected against the two men indicates they had "planned and organized terrorist attacks and guerrilla actions." Ayachi, 62, who was born in Syria, was previously known to authorities as a radical imam who oversaw a reputedly extremist mosque in Belgium. Like Ayachi, Gendron - described as a 33-year old computer...
...have been spared the devastation of jihadist suicide bombings since the deadly March 2004 attacks in Madrid, but on Tuesday morning there was another grim reminder that the threat of terrorism is far from over. Italian police in the southern city of Bari announced that they are holding two French nationals whom authorities call "top-level point men" for "al-Qaeda in Europe" and who were allegedly plotting kamikaze strikes in France and the U.K. - including one purportedly targeting the Charles de Gaulle airport. Counter-terrorism authorities in Paris tell TIME, meanwhile, that they believe the pair is only...
...French security officials confide to TIME that when Italian police arrested Ayachi and Gendron late last year, the Italians were not aware of the ongoing investigation into the network to which the two men allegedly belonged. For more than a year, authorities in Belgium and France had been arresting suspected radicals whom they allege have connections to the same network - climaxing in a Dec. 11 raid in Brussels that took 14 people into custody. Most of those arrested remain in detention as Belgian authorities continue investigating the case of what they described at the time as a looming suicide bomb...
...According to French officials, Ayachi and Gendron had left Brussels sometime before the Dec. 11 raid, but nobody knew to where. It turns out that - unbeknownst to Belgian or French authorities - Ayachi and Gendron had actually been arrested in November, after Italian police stopped the camping car in which they were entering southern Italy and discovered five illegal Palestinian and Syrian aliens hiding inside. (See pictures of Fatah vs. Hamas...
...Italian and French officials now say they believe the pair had been trying to furtively return to Europe from Syria, where they had picked up the five Palestinian and Syrian illegals as volunteers for their suspected planned attacks. "We know what kinds of activities [Ayachi and Gendron] had been up to after watching them for months, and they'd never run illegal aliens into Europe before," says a French counter-terrorism official. "You can be pretty sure if they were arrested by the Italians bringing five illegals in when they did, it wasn't to organize a little round...