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Libya warns Italy about Milan-based Islamic State cell

Iman Sami Salem delivers a speech during a mass in the church Santa Maria in trastevere in Rome on July 31, 2016.

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If they were successful in reaching Italy, the Isil members could plan attacks on targets in Europe.

Libya has warned Italy about an Islamic State cell operating in Milan and linked to a terrorist warlord, who was previously deported by the Italian authorities.

The terrorist cell, reportedly based in Milan’s San Siro neighborhood, has been connected with Abu Nassim, a Tunisian IS commander, who lived in Italy for most of the 1990s.

Fighters from the Islamic State (ISIS) extremist group, displaced from one of their key bases in the Libyan city of Sirte, could attempt to cross the Mediterranean Sea into Europe disguised as asylum seekers, Italy has warned. The Italian Interior Minister, Angelino Alfano, said that it is significant to expel all of the supporters of the armed terrorists from Italy.

The cleric is the ninth imam to be kicked out since the start of 2015 under a “zero tolerance” approach to Islamist militancy which Alfano says has reduced the risk of a terror attack on Italian soil.

According to AFP, Alfano has signed a total of 43 expulsion orders in 2016 and another 66 previous year. Abu Nassim’s real name is Moez Ben Abdelkader Fezzani, and he came to Italy in 1989 as a construction worker, wrote the Italian newspaper. He disappeared in 1997 resurfacing in Pakistan and later joining the late Osama bin Laden’s forces in Afghanistan.

The U.S. military arrested Nassim in 2001 and detained him at Bagram air base, a notorious U.S. prison facility.

In 2012, an Italian court found Abu Nassim not guilty of terrorist recruitment and he was deported to Tunisia. However, it was too late as Abu Nassim was already fighting with IS terrorists in Syria.

Nassim then moved to Libya in 2014 to take charge of ISIS fighters near the western Libyan city of Sabratha, which sits close to the porous Tunisian border where many ISIS foreign fighters have traveled from.

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Tunisia issued a warrant for his arrest in connection with the March 2015 Bardo Museum attack in Tunis, in which gunmen killed 21 tourists and a policeman.

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