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...ITALY Rome Attack Foiled A police raid on a suburb southeast of Rome may have thwarted a possible biochemical attack in the Italian capital. Four Moroccan men were arrested after 4 kg of a powdered cyanide-based substance were found in their apartment, along with city maps indicating the U.S. embassy and charts of Rome's water system. The arrests were made as a Milan court convicted four Tunisians, including the alleged al-Qaeda regional head, Ben Khemais, of trafficking in chemicals, explosives and false documents...
...verdicts on criminal-association charges, the threat of a chemical attack suddenly seemed much more tangible. Following leads relating to another potential Islamic terrorist cell, Italian authorities found 4 kg of a cyanide-based substance in a run-down apartment in the Due Leoni neighborhood 10 km southeast of Rome...
...predawn raid netted four Moroccan men and dozens of fake identification documents, charts of the capital's water systems and a Rome city map with the U.S. embassy circled in red. As news of the arrests spread, there was immediate concern that the city's water supply was a terrorist target, with some reports indicating that the terrorists had identified access to the water system under the U.S. embassy on the Via Veneto. But further investigation led authorities to suspect that they had thwarted not an attempt to poison the water supply, but the kind of chemical attack that...
...Rome's chief prosecutor Salvatore Vecchione said the substance appeared to be potassium ferrocyanide, a chemical commonly used in gardening and textile dyeing. According to Aldo Lagana, a professor of analytic chemistry at Rome's La Sapienza University, the substance is not lethal when diluted in water. Lagana noted, however, that potassium ferrocyanide can easily be ignited by ordinary gunpowder. "If you burn it in a closed environment," he says, "you can have a very serious situation." The arrested men might have had an attack of this sort - in a subway, perhaps - in mind...
...motives, however, were less than pure; although he undoubtedly had a sense of the Aeneid’s unsurpassable greatness, the poem also served Augustus on a more practical level by extolling, at least on a superficial level, the greatness of imperial Rome—the Rome that Augustus personified...