The
following excerpts are from Fox
News:
Italian
security forces were rounding up 18 Islamic extremists Friday who
prosecutors said were behind a failed 2010 plot to attack the Vatican
as well as a bombing at a Pakistan market that killed more than 100 a
year earlier.
Prosecutor
Mauro Mura told reporters in Cagliari, Sardinia, on Friday that
wiretaps indicated the suspected terrorists, including two former
bodyguards for Usama bin Laden, planned a bomb attack at the Vatican
and went as far as to send a suicide bomber to Rome. Mura said the
attack plans never went further and that the suicide bomber left
Italy, though it wasn't clear why.
“We
don’t have proof, we have strong suspicion,” Mario Carta, head of
the police unit leading the investigation, said when asked for more
details on a possible attack against the seat of the Catholic church.
Authorities
said nine suspects had been caught, and another nine were being
sought, three of whom were believed to still be in the country. One
of the suspects arrested Friday had a construction business in
Sardinia that participated in work for a Group of Eight summit
planned for Sardinia but that was later moved to quake-stricken
Aquilia, in Abruzzo to boost reconstruction. Another was an imam in
the northern province of Bergamo.
Vatican
secretary of state Pietro Parolin said the threat is chilling, even
if it is old.
"We
are all exposed and we are all afraid," Parolin said. "But
the pope is very calm for this, it's enough to watch him meeting
people with great clarity and serenity."
At
the time of the suspected plot to bomb the Vatican, Pope Benedict XVI
was still reeling from the effects in the Muslim world of a 2006
speech in Regensburg, Germany, in which he quoted a Byzantine emperor
who characterized some of the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad as
"evil and inhuman," particularly "his command to
spread by the sword the faith."
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Italian police round up terror suspects in failed Vatican plot, deadly Pakistan attack | Fox News
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