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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...
Continental Europeans may 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...
...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...
...Once the document and its objectives had been thoroughly watered down, it was of little wonder that leaders such as France's President Nicolas Sarkozy, Italian premier Silvio Berlusconi, Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown all found more productive things to do rather than attend the EaP launch summit. (Watch a TIME video with Gordon Brown...
Sergio Minerbi, a former Israeli ambassador and scholar on Israeli-Vactian affairs, was given shelter from the Nazis in an Italian Catholic Boys School during the war. But Minerbi, who has met Benedict several times when he was still a cardinal, says the Pope wants to "Christianize the Holocaust." Minerbi concludes: "There's a long way to go before the Vatican and the Jews establish friendly relations." (See pictures of Hitler's rise to power...