Italy on Wednesday said it had arrested a Moroccan illegal immigrant suspected of involvement in a deadly attack on a Tunis museum, fueling a row over the threat of extremists arriving in Europe by boat.
Authorities in Tunisia have arrested nearly two dozen suspects in connection with the March attack in which 21 tourists died, but Abdel Majid Touil, 22, was thought to be the first to be detained abroad.
Touil, who was wanted for premeditated murder, kidnapping and terrorism, according to the police, was detained on Tuesday evening by Italy’s anti-terrorism DIGOS police in the northern town of Gaggiano.
Photo: EPA
He had arrived in Italy in February on a migrant boat and was living with his mother and two older brothers, who are legally resident in the town near Milan.
Police seized papers and USB flash drives from his house.
The attack on the Bardo National Museum on March 18 left 24 people dead: two gunmen, a Tunisian policeman and tourists from Italy, Japan, France, Spain, Colombia, Australia, Britain, Belgium, Poland and Russia.
Visitors getting off buses outside the museum were gunned down by two black-clad shooters with automatic weapons, who then took hostages inside the building.
Many people were shot in the back as they tried to escape. After rampaging through the museum for several hours, the gunmen were killed in an assault by security forces.
At the end of March, Tunisian forces killed nine suspected members of a militant group accused of being behind the shooting, the Okba Ibn Nafaa Brigade, including an Algerian who allegedly masterminded the attack.
Tunisian President Beji Caid Essebsi said a few days after the shooting that a third gunman was on the run, but it later emerged that he may have been referring to an accomplice who was not at the scene.
The Tunisian Ministry of the Interior on Wednesday said it had “issued international arrest warrants for two Moroccans and an Algerian with an indirect link” to the attack, but did not specify if the man arrested in Italy was one of them.
The three men “did not take part in the terrorist operation, but helped” the attackers, said ministry spokesman Mohamed Ali Aroui, who declined to give further details.
Police said Touil had been in Italy before the attack, after entering illegally in February with a boatload of 90 migrants.
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