Publication

From Criminals To Terrorists And Back? Quarterly Report: Italy, vol. 2

01.07.2019

The second report dissects the stories behind 58 individuals arrested or otherwise processed by the security forces in 2015 in Italy. Interestingly, only a very small minority of four were actually Italian citizens. The rest are from as close as Albania to as far as from Pakistan, while the largest is the Moroccan contingent. The most effective and used measure to deal with the terrorist threat remains the act of expulsion for which this country became a leader among its European counterparts. From all of the collected cases a half (29) were removed from Italian soil by the Ministry of Interior.

After looking at localities from where these cases emerged it is easy to see a heavy prevalence in the north of the country in the provinces of Bologna and Milan followed by the provinces of Bergamo and Brescia.

Crime-terror nexus is small in scale but rich in diversity of crime ranging from petty to very severe such as obtaining explosives and human smuggling. In some cases it is difficult to talk about crime-terror nexus as the two kinds of activities are not necessarily connected and simply refer to different times in the individual’s past but in others they represent a trajectory from one ambience to another or there is a parallel co-existence where ‘regular’ crime was used to aid in terrorism and the two are one milieu. There are a few common traits among these criminals, and some make them stand out from the rest of the subset but you can learn more about them in the report.

Please read the full report prepared by research analysts Giovanni Giacamole and Nicolò Spagna from the ITSTIME research centre led by professor Marco Lombardi at the Catholic University of Sacred Heart in Milan.